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Mayim Bialik
Mind Breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.
Jonathan Cohen
Spring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues. Night sweats, back pain, motion transfer. Those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door which is so much fun. With free shipping in the US they have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus their Happy With Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new Mattress. Go to helixsleep do for 27% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com breakdown for 27% off site wide helixsleep.com breakdown a vacation rental should
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
come with support, not surprises.
Jonathan Cohen
That's why VRBO comes with a VRBoCare guarantee and 24.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
7 life support from Real people. So if something goes sideways, Verbocare can help. If the host cancels Verbocare if the
Jonathan Cohen
listing says heated pool but there's actually
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
no pool to heat.
Jonathan Cohen
Definitely a verbo care thing.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
If my teenager starts calling me Leslie instead of mom, that's a family thing. Leslie. That makes sense. Sorry, book with support, not surprises.
Jonathan Cohen
Verbo care and 24.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
7 life support. If you know you're Vrbo terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details. My daily drug regimen was heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, mushrooms, lsd. My body collapsed and I could see myself outside of myself.
Jonathan Cohen
That's the out of body experience which is a hallmark of an nd it
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
was so dark and I just remember thinking I must be dead. And I started to hear my dad's voice chanting to me, you are worthy of all the love in the universe. My parents were both drug addicts and they committed suicide together. I started to experience their suicide, but from their perspective. That's when I landed in the light of the near death experience.
Jonathan Cohen
Wow.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I find myself on what feels like the deck of a spaceship. There's thousands of other souls all around me. My soul came online and Activated. For the first time ever, I saw the fabric of creation. My soul planned my life before I got here. Planned out all these big plot points that were going to happen. Addiction recovery, spiritual awakening. I saw all the women that I harmed. I would manipulate women, I'd get them strung out on drugs. Their faces, the pain, the agony. I was really witnessing the kind of person that I was. And of course I feel guilt and remorse for what I've done. But guilt taps me on the shoulder and says, okay, make it right. If I was awoken, I know that something is happening on a big, large scale. Everybody has access to, to their guides and angels, okay? Our guides are our Earth customer service agents. You have to call them in order to get connection. Every soul is here to accomplish some sort of forgiveness for just one step away.
Jonathan Cohen
Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen and welcome to our Breakdown People. I can't explain what's about to happen to you in this episode.
Mayim Bialik
Today is an extremely powerful story of personal and spiritual transformation unlike anything we've ever heard on this podcast.
Jonathan Cohen
I have never heard a story so bizarre, so complicated and with such a dramatic, drastic, intense transformation.
Mayim Bialik
Someone who is struggling with addiction, with poverty.
Jonathan Cohen
This is a woman, a self described dumpster for drugs, who experienced a life that no one that I know could even access like an understanding of what this woman's life was like. And she introduces us into a world that she was immersed in, of addiction to opioids, methamphetamine, heroin. She was a prostitute, she was a pimp. She grew up in poverty. She believed that there was no opening in life for her. And through a series of attempts at sobriety, which all were, I don't even wanna use the word, unsuccessful, they were part of a journey that led her to being unconscious on the floor of an apartment and having an experience that she believed was a psychotic drug induced state which revealed itself to be components of a near death experience combined with a spiritual transformation that have led her to an understanding of the universe that echoes mystics, physicists, Kundalini, awakening. And she dedicates her life to living guided by spirit, guided by an understanding of the soul that chose this iteration of her life. The way that she describes our existence as not even a simulation, a video game, a theater that we're all playing our roles in. She dedicates her life to helping people in recovery who believe there is no love for them in the universe. The number of coincidences, the number of messages that she received, it is a fascinating. It's a gripping story. My jaw was open most of the time.
Mayim Bialik
Just before we get to this episode, if you aren't already subscribed to the podcast, please do us a favor. Subscribe. It helps us make the best possible episodes for you. And our promise is that we will continue to do that. And if you want to check out more about the Bialik Breakdown universe, check out, check out our substack Mayimbialics breakdown on substack.
Jonathan Cohen
Our guest today who is going to walk us through her incredible journey is Betty Guadagno. She is known as Buddha Betty. That's B U D D H A Betty at her website. She's a transformation coach. She's a writer, she's a spiritual teacher. Her life has been shaped by trauma, addiction and this near death experience that she's going to share with us. She survived deep decades of abuse, prostitution. Her parents died in a dual suicide when she was in her 20s. She's gonna talk about meeting them in other realms and it's just such an honor to get to speak to her and welcome her in person. Betty, welcome to the Breakdown. Break it down.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
So grateful to be here.
Jonathan Cohen
We're very eager to hear your whole, whole story because, you know, sometimes we talk to people about the work that they do now and sometimes we talk to people about what they came from. And the transformation that you experienced is so heavily weighted on kind of the life that you came from. So in a nutshell, can you explain what you do now and how you got here?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, so I do a couple different things. I work as a transformation coach. That's one of the things that I do. I also work as a peer supervisor in New York City and I do a lot of outreach. So I'm helping the population, the homeless population with substance use disorder, trying to get them connected to care. And yeah, I get to like advocate for people. And the reason why I'm able to do all those things is because I've undergone a major transformation myself and overcome substance use disorder and all different kinds of addictions in my life.
Mayim Bialik
You had an unbelievable near death experience.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, pretty unbelievable. Yes. Totally transformational, 180 degree turnaround in my life.
Mayim Bialik
The details of this we're gonna get into later in the episode, but are vivid and somewhat shocking and quite different than any other nde. You know, we've spoken to some people. Everyone has a unique experience. Yours is uniquely yours. What can you tell people who maybe have never heard about an nde? Just like the power of transformation of that experience before we get into the Details.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. I think that near death experiences are like fingerprints. They're super unique to each individual. I felt like pieces of my personality came along with me because my experience is kind of comical and funny and definitely tailored to me so that I could understand it. I had never heard of a near death experience before this happened to me. I had never heard of a spiritual awakening. None of these things were on my radar. So near death experiences is basically when someone's on the verge of death or they've been clinically pronounced dead. And there's a couple of very mirrored markers that happen for a lot of different people. They see a tunnel of light, they reconnect with loved ones that have been lost in, in this, you know, in, in this lifetime. They sometimes they have a life review, sometimes they see their pre birth planning. So there's definitely markers that hit a lot of different near death experiencers. There's some mirrored experiences.
Jonathan Cohen
Your near death experience was, as you said, they're like fingerprints. Right? They're all unique. We've spoken to a lot of people who have had accidents. We've spoken to, you know, several of kind of the nation's leading recounters of NDEs. And I'd say most, most of those experiences occur in, in hospitals under anesthesia, in many cases from, you know, horrible accidents. Yours was the result of a near death drug overdose. Can you explain a little bit the uniqueness of that experience? Meaning, did you understand that you were in a critical, fatal, you know, potentially fatal situation that you then came out of? How did you frame it at the time?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, I definitely didn't know what happened to me. Even throughout the whole experience. I was just blasted out on my bathroom floor like I took too many drugs, you know.
Jonathan Cohen
Can we ask what kind of drugs? Because, I mean, not that I'm trying to be like which kind of drugs lead to, but you didn't just like smoke some weed and almost died, right?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No. Yeah. So I, at this point in time in my life, I was at the tail end of my active addiction. So I was basically a dumpster for drugs. This particular day I went down my drugalog that I had, that I did every day, but this day I decided to do a little bit extra of each because I was gonna go do my laundry. And like, that's so boring, so might as well be real messed up for something so boring. And I guess just the combination of all the things with that little bit of added extra just absolutely was not gonna happen. So my daily drug regimen was heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine, mushrooms, lsd. Like I was really a dumpster for drugs. So just anything I can get my hands on. But yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
So tell me what happened. So you were in the bathroom at some point, you have a recollection of that moment of being conscious and aware and then something happened.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, my body kind of collapsed and I could see myself outside of myself.
Jonathan Cohen
So that's the out of body experience, which is a hallmark of an NDA, definitely.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
And I was like, wow, she looks really messed up. But. So the first part of my experience was a. A life review. That's what it felt like. I started to experience every feeling that could happen, not just in my own life, but that happened on earth. So, like, every emotion, every experience was happening to me simultaneously, all at the exact same moment. My whole consciousness was completely cracked open. And some of the really vivid things is that, you know, like I shared. I was in active addiction for over 20 years, and the very end of my active addiction was a horror show. I mean, like, I was manipulating people, I was tormenting them, I was stealing, I was lying, I was cheating. And so in my life review, those were the things that I started to experience right away. And it was so dark and it was so dense. And I just remember thinking, I must be dead and I'm in hell. Like, I didn't believe that anything happens after you die. I was a pretty staunch atheist, but I definitely wasn't expecting what I was experiencing. And I was like, well, this is way worse than I thought. And so as I was experiencing all of those super dense emotions, I had some life experiences start to flood back to me to experience both sides of it. Like in my life, trigger warning. But my parents were both drug addicts and they committed suicide together when I was in my early 20s due to their addiction. And, you know, they were really immersed in poverty as well. So I started to experience their suicide, but from their perspective. And again, it just felt like the most agonizing betrayal of life. It just felt so painful, like every cell in my body was being shredded apart. And I went through the whole process with them. Like, I saw things from their suicide that I didn't know had happened. Like, I watched them drive to the pharmacy to go pick up their refills that they used to overdose. I watched them write their suicide notes together. I watched them embrace each other as their bodies started dying. And the pain that I was experiencing was so overwhelming. And so I just thought, okay, I'm seeing my parents, I know that they're dead. So I must be dead. And and then in that moment, I started to hear my dad's voice came through to me in this very tangible, present way. And he just started chanting to me, you are worthy of all the love in the universe. You are worthy of all the love in the universe. And I didn't believe that, but I believed him. Like I trusted his voice. And so I started to follow his voice. And that's when I landed in the light of the near death experience.
Mayim Bialik
This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews, an open door media brand.
Jonathan Cohen
If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years. Wandering Jews with Michal and Noam is a podcast where two of today's most dynamic Jewish voices, Michal Bittone and Noam Weissman, dig into the biggest questions about life through a Jewish lens. It's the kind of conversation where you'll laugh, learn something new, and probably shout in disagreement at least once. Michal and Noam tackle the tough topics like antisemitism in America, what happens after we die, and the future of religion with guests like Bret Stephens, Michael Rapoport and Sarah Hurwitz. And this past month, in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, they've been celebrating some of the Jewish lives and institutions that have shaped American life, from food to music and comedy. Thoughtful, joyful, and always honest. That's Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam, a production of Unpacked. Find it on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at Unpacked Bio NMX
Mayim Bialik
Mind Bialix Breakdown is supported by bioptimizers.
Jonathan Cohen
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Mayim Bialik
Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. Before we go fully into this, I. I have heard part of this story and it's like already you can feel the intensity of the shift when your father comes in. Take us backwards before this. And actually, you know, you and I, we've spoken to some of the leading researchers of near death experience. We spoke to Dr. Bruce Grayson, we spoke to Jim Tucker. What you're describing when you say you left your body and you could see yourself, the current medical understanding is that that's not possible. If we frame this at the point where we go outside of what's currently understood by people other than these experts.
Jonathan Cohen
Well, yeah, I don't. I mean, I think that the notion of this out of body experience is one that, you know, takes us into a conversation of, like, literally, who are we? And I think some of this you can explain much better than we can. You know, we have more of a, you know, sort of layperson's understanding of, like, what is consciousness and who are we? Now, if anyone's had a psychedelic experience or a transcendental experience, you. You can understand what ego death is. It's the part when, like, the anxious people who take mushrooms are like, do I have to go to the hospital now? But that notion of sort of like losing yourself. So what you're describing though is that there is a self that can observe the vessel that we are physically in, but that our consciousness as we know it does not have to have a body to reside.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right. Yeah. And I think that this gets into the debate of do you need scientific black and white on a piece of paper evidence, or can you leave room in your life for mystery and faith? So the whole world is just this belief system. We're all designing our own belief system. I would have. I wouldn't. I didn't know about any of this before it happened to me and I didn't believe it for months after it happened to me either.
Mayim Bialik
And. But that's exactly what we're doing here. Sort of the purpose of our podcast has always been human experience from a first person lived narrative, expanding the realm and people getting consciousness, expansion, having awakenings, having things that they can't explain. And some of the scientists who are catching up, trying to make sense of it and expanding the sort of co quote unquote world order to make sense of things. And so what I love in, in this moment that we're harping in on is this moment of a change in consciousness whereby all of a sudden we're seeing things that are outside of what's physically happening. You're having extra sensory experience, you've gone off to some other realm and we're going to get fully into that. Before we do that, take us backwards to how you got to that moment in the bathroom.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. So I. It's some of my origin story that I think kind of really sets up for that. The impact of the near death experience is I grew up in this really traumatizing environment. It was super chaotic. It was full of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, addiction. And so my whole life I was just taught that if anything uncomfortable happens to you, don't talk about it, just medicate it and sedate it. And I just. And the reason that I learned that is because I watched everybody else in my family do that. So I just took all these mental notes. Nobody ever shot me up with drugs. You know, nobody ever handed me my first bag of heroin. But I just kept making all these mental notes. I was watching what the adults in my family were doing and I said, I'm gonna do that the second that I can.
Mayim Bialik
And where did you grow up?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I grew up in Las Vegas. So perfect setting for absolute debauchery to take place in a person's life.
Jonathan Cohen
Talk a little bit about sort of what your entry point was into the world of addiction. There's many different kinds of stories. And for those of us who grow up in the disease, we see it all around us and some of us have different coping mechanisms. Some of us choose the same coping mechanisms. When was your first attempt to say, I'm going to fill the God shaped hole with this?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, I think when I really think about it in a, in a tracing it back sort of way, I think that sugar was probably my first addiction. Food really came in and comforted me. And it was almost weaponized, too. A little bit food in my house, and it was used as a reward. And so there was just all of these different things around it. Fantasy addiction came into my life really early, too. I would love to just escape. Escape the world that I was actually witnessing and just pretend that I was somewhere else. And then drugs came into my life. Around 12 years old was probably the first time that I tried substances. And maybe by the time I was 15, I knew that I was in love with substances. Really, truly in love with them.
Jonathan Cohen
What did it do? What did it feel like?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, so my first. My first real drug was methamphetamine. Because I grew up in Las Vegas, and this is like little pre Breaking Bad era. That's really what it was like. There was just like, all of these trailers that were blowing up because they were meth labs out in the middle of the desert. And I was a really good student. I was actually a good kid. I was trying to escape the cycle of my family, which, again, is like, no education, poverty, rinse, repeat over and over again. And I was in all these advanced placement classes, and one of the girls from one of my classes came over to study, and she said, hey, do you want to stay up all night and study? And I was like, yeah, I definitely do. That sounds great. And then studying went right out the window. After we did this drug for the first time, and it just progressed from there. It got really bad. First time I went to rehab, I was 18, and I knew that I had a problem, but I wasn't going to stop using substances at 18. When am I never going to have a glass of champagne when I turned 21? As if I was ever going to drink champagne. That was, like, not my. I think. But, yeah, it really. You know, the progression of the dis. Ease of addiction is so insane, and it just swept me away. But after my parents died from their addiction, I had these two voices. One said, you need to stop using drugs. They just kill your parents. And then the other voice said, you have to keep using. It's all that you have left of them. What kind of. This is your legacy. You have to continue the legacy of your family, no matter how, you know, no matter how bad it is.
Jonathan Cohen
What was the home like that you grew up in? Did you have siblings? Was there extended family?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, so grew up around cousins, aunts. I have a little sister. And the life inside the home was a lot of physical abuse. My parents really. They didn't like each other, but they stayed together because this is what they were taught to do. You just stay unhappy and you stay miserable and you take it out on each other. So I think I learned really young that fighting equals love. That abuse equals love.
Jonathan Cohen
Danger.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. And, yeah. Mistaking chaos for connection. And so I repeated all those patterns well into until I got into recovery. And I was like, oh, wow. I am also a toxically codependent person. I don't actually want to die with somebody like my parents did. I want to live with someone. I want to learn how to actually live a real life.
Jonathan Cohen
The subject of your parents is, I think, one of the most painful, you know, circumstances that anyone could imagine. You were out of the house by the time that your parents passed, correct?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes.
Jonathan Cohen
And were you aware that they wanted to end their lives?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
My mom was super suicidal for many years before she actually completed suicide. She had probably tried to kill herself at least a dozen times. Yeah, definitely. And that's just in the last couple of years before they actually died. But I never in a million years could have ever conceptualized that my father would do that or that they would do it together.
Jonathan Cohen
What was it about your father that felt like you couldn't imagine that?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I don't know. He just, even though his life was really hard, he just seemed like that was not an option. And I used to see how upset he would get every time that my mom tried and he would call her names and tell her that she wasn't allowed to leave us like that, and that wasn't the way that we do things. And. Yeah. And you know, in my life review, I felt how desperate they felt just on that verge of. It was agony.
Jonathan Cohen
Yeah. I guess I'm curious and I know it's hard, generally when you ask someone this, that person hasn't had interactions with these people in an nde. But I'm wondering, before that nde, what was your understanding of your parents decision to sort of leave that way? Was it simply that the cost of living was too high emotionally? Like, what was it?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
So this was the height of the oxycontin epidemic. And my parents would go around, they would doctor, shop. They were prescribed over a thousand pills each every month. And they would sell half their pills, they would eat the other half, but every month they would always run out. And there was never enough pills to make money, money enough to pay the rent or the lights or the gas or the phone bill. And so I know that I had gotten married three weeks before their suicide. And so I think that in their minds they were thinking, well, the big one Has a husband now. She'll take care of the little one. My sister had just gotten her first grown up job in a casino. So in Las Vegas, when you get into a casino, you're set for life if that's all that you want to do with your life. And so I know that they had some rationalization to their decision and they were going through a really intense detox. And the day of their suicide was the day that they were able to pick up their refills again. And they just decided, I can't do this again next month and I'm just gonna be done with this now.
Jonathan Cohen
What was it like when you found out?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh, I found them. Yeah. My sister and I found them and it was terrible. I've done a lot of healing around it, so I'm able to talk about it without falling apart. But me, 10 years ago, I could have never been able to do this. We got to their house. My sister had spent the night at my house for her weekend from work, which was like a Tuesday, Wednesday. And my dad called us on Wednesday in the day, and he said, hey, keep your sister for another night. The lights are still turned off, the gas is turned off, and there's nothing for her to do here. And I was like, okay, no problem. And the next day we were calling them all day to see if it was okay to bring her home. And no answer. And I just started to get like this eerie feeling, and so did she. And so we drove over to their house to see what was going on. And when we pulled up to the house, we could hear the smoke alarms from outside. And so of course, we run to the door, we touch the door handle, it's not hot. Bust inside. My first instinct is to run to the stove because they would nod out all the time. They were opiate addicts and benzo addicts. So I'm thinking, okay, they were cooking something, they left the stove on, and now there's some sort of fire. I run to the stove and I put my hands on it and I could see this fine layer of soot. I see my handprint on the stove. And then I remember, oh, wait, the gas is turned off. There can't be a fire on the stove. And then I hear my sister's scream from upstairs in their bedroom. And she comes tumbling down the stairs as I go climbing up them. And I get into my parents room and I just see my father's body slumped over the side of the bed. And I see the whole blanket is just littered in pill bottles and pills and because there was no electricity turned on, they had lit candles inside the room. And as their bodies were dying, they flung themselves off the bed, and my mother's body hit the candle, which then caught a lamp on fire, which caught the wall on fire. By the time that we had gotten there, it had extinguished itself, but the sound of the smoke alarms was still going off. And, yeah, it was so traumatizing. And my sister was screaming her head off, and I was so scared that they were gonna take her away from me because they were gonna put her in an insane asylum. And now I realize that that was the only normal reaction to have to a situation like this. But, yeah, it was a really messed up situation, and it kept me strung out on drugs to medicate that.
Jonathan Cohen
So I was just gonna say you weren't clean at the time.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I was. I was. I had about two weeks clean. I had just detoxed myself. And I was at this war with myself. And I remember my parents left the pills that they knew that I could sell on the bed. And I said, all I have to do is just grab these and put these into my pockets before the police get here, and I'll be okay. I'll feel better. And I was at this crossroads, and I just told myself that there was no way that I could get through this pain without using.
Jonathan Cohen
So how old are you at this time?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
23.
Jonathan Cohen
I'm trying to do the math now.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, this was 17 years ago. It'll be 18 years ago this year.
Jonathan Cohen
So what was the course of that kind of journey for you? And then how did that get us to the nde?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, you know, my whole life was just trying to medicate this wound, and I abandoned my sister, and I left her across the country. I said that I couldn't deal, and I said that I didn't want to be her mom, and our mom didn't want to be our mom. And I just destruction everywhere. I wanted everybody to hurt as deeply and badly as I hurt. I didn't even know that there was a way to heal from anything. And so I just kept going around, causing harm everywhere that I went.
Jonathan Cohen
What was the next decade of your life like?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh, it was total chaos. Total chaos. Marriages, divorces, apartments found apartments, lost, like, dozens of jobs just bouncing around from place to place. No foundation, no stability. Just use, destroy, rinse, repeat over and over and over again.
Mayim Bialik
Where were you in the.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I had moved back to New York where my extended family is, and it's where my parents were from, and I was born there, so I'M in Brooklyn this whole time, just, you know, causing havoc in the streets of New York City.
Mayim Bialik
And did your sister go back to New York as well?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No, no, no. I left her in Las Vegas and she built a whole life for herself despite, you know, the most tragic circumstances and her sister abandoning her for drugs. It was like the whole family. For the whole family, except for my sister. Drugs was more important than anything else.
Jonathan Cohen
I wanna ask about, you know, an aspect of your story which a lot of people don't talk about and a lot of people are uncomfortable talking about it. Sex work is part of a lot of addiction stories. And, you know, we talk about sort of the lengths that we go to, you know, and the situations that we find ourselves in. And I wonder if there's a perspective you can offer us about sort of, you know. I'm not gonna ask you why you did that. I think we understand. Right. But I'm curious, you know, with your hindsight, what sort of that feels like for you to think about, you know, also how close you were to sort of losing so many parts of yourself, right?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. Oh, I did lose a ton of parts of myself. It took me. I mean, I'm still on a healing process from, you know, how I treated myself and my body. The one thing that I took away from my spiritual experience was that there's no such thing as condemnation. So if I want to be a prostitute and do whatever I want, I'm still going to heaven when I'm done here. Like, there's, there's no way that I'm not getting back there. If I already made it there once, I'm definitely going back there again. But, you know, and I know that sex work is very empowering for a lot of women. I mean, so they say I. I'll believe them if that's what they're going with. For me, this was something that I did because I needed money to get drugs and no other reason. And it caused a lot of damage to me. I saw men in this really distorted way. And then I became very empathetic and compassionate towards them. And I started to hate women. And I was just like this very self hating. I was like an anti feminist. I used to go on these long rants about how women are the worst. And I just really, really did not like myself. And I didn't have any scope of what it meant to love my body, like love my temple, and to not share it with everybody. This is not meant for everyone. And that's something that I've had to learn over time and heal all those pieces of it. But, yeah, you know, for me, sex work was not an empowering thing. It was really the end of the line, and it was the bottom of rock bottom.
Jonathan Cohen
We're, you know, kind of taking this decade of your life, and we're sort of like, you know, shrinking it and, you know, trying to sort of arrive at, you know, you came to a point where you obviously were using to the level that it could kill you really, at any time. Like, once you're, you know. And this is something I tell my teenagers, you know, once you enter the land of, you know, and, like, insert drug here, whatever, you know, there's a certain dance with death that you're doing. Can you sort of talk a little bit about what? Looking back now, what was Betty experiencing that there was a level of comfort in dancing with death?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, addiction is soft suicide. So I wasn't gonna flat out do it, but I was absolutely ready for it at any moment. And again, I was an atheist. I thought that it just meant blackness and nothing else, and I was totally okay with that. Darkness and nothingness was way better than what I was experiencing. And I think that it felt comforting to be in that level of chaos. It felt so normal. That's how I grew up. I grew up in that level of chaos. So just not knowing felt empowering. And, you know, it's funny because in recovery, they say, like, just live for today. And in active addiction, I was just living for today as well, just in a totally different way. I was like, just live for today. Cause you might die at the end of the day. And today it's like, just live for today. Because that's all that we can do, is we just need to stay present. So, yeah, it's so strange how, like, both sides of that coin. But, yeah, you know, this soft suicide that I was dancing with for so long was really just to hide the pain.
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Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
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Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
How many times did you try?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
At least a dozen times.
Jonathan Cohen
And what was that like when you would go.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
You know, I never really went into detox and rehab with the intention of getting clean and staying clean. I just went into less.
Jonathan Cohen
Where were you going?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Just to rest, recalibrate, reset so that the. So that the drugs would work again. Cause they stopped working? Yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
What does that mean when you say they stopped working?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, you know, you could take. You just, you build up a tolerance. So maybe I would use five bags of heroin a day and at one point in time that would get me high. But then it just became maintenance and it was just to not get sick and I wanted to be able to get high again. So I would go into detox for a week. Sometimes I would go for a couple weeks into rehab. I did try once to really truly give it a shot because my second husband had left me and I thought, okay, if I stop using drugs, maybe I can get him back.
Jonathan Cohen
And my favorite reason to stop using
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
drugs, which didn't work. And yeah, I left the long term facility that I was in because they wouldn't let me draw on my eyebrows. And I was like, I'm not staying here.
Jonathan Cohen
Your eyebrows are kind of on floor.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Well, now they're tattooed on my face.
Mayim Bialik
For someone who hasn't been in this world or known people in this world, can you just check into a facility? Like how does it work? You're sort of clearly in active addiction. And then you just decide and you're just able. There's just opportunity to check yourself in. Tell us a little bit about the relationship.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, I love that you're making space for this because some people really don't know know, and they think that you have to have a bunch of money to go into a detox or rehab, maybe a fancy one. But there's all of these state funded detoxes. Yes, yes. And so yeah, I would just go to the hospital because most hospitals do, at least in New York, I don't know what it's like out here. But most hospitals do have a detox and a rehab within them. And so I would just go to the hospital whether my insurance was turned on or not. The hospital would help me take care of that. And I could get a bed inside of a detox or a rehab.
Mayim Bialik
And it's multiple weeks. Like, what is that process like? And the second part of that question is tell us a little bit about the agony of detox. Because I think a lot of people don't understand. They're like, oh, you should just stop doing drugs and get your head right. And this is a moral issue. Like, tell us about the hook of. And pain of detox.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, so just, you know, and I work in the field of substance use disorder today and insurance isn't great. And so today it doesn't let you stay in rehab as long as you used to be able to. It used to be 28 days. Now it's more like 11 and which is impossible. How's a person supposed to get well after 11 days? It's totally insane.
Jonathan Cohen
Well, they'll get you dry, right?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes. And then maybe not even, you know, I don't know. They don't really set you up for success either. You know, I'm a product now. I went into a long term treatment facility that I'm so grateful for and I stayed there for a year and a half because I just needed foundation. And it was. It sucked. It sucked. I had all these rules I had to follow. I hated all the people I was there with. I hated myself. I didn't know who I was. But I always say, your eyebrows. Yeah, they let me. After a month, you're allowed to draw your eyebrows on.
Jonathan Cohen
They're like, you will detox with no eyebrows.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right, right, right. But yeah, you know, the system. I don't know if the system is set up to help people, but that's why I put myself in those spaces. That's why I want to work in that field. That's why I want to be present for people going through recovery, because maybe the system isn't set up to help us, but, you know, we could have little lights set up along the way, and that's the people who choose to work in that field. Like, it's not glamorous.
Jonathan Cohen
So when you go into a facility like that and your body is addicted, and with heroin, like, every single cell and every mechanism of every single cell is addicted to that drug. And the definition of addiction is when you stop using it, the symptoms become intolerable, and you start using again to prevent the symptoms. So explain what happens when you go in. The first handful of days are apparently hell on earth. Talk about the withdrawal process and kind of that detox process, and then what happens at let's say one week versus two weeks versus four weeks.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, withdrawal is hell. Literal hell. And the worst part about opiate withdrawal is that there's nothing. There's nothing physically wrong with you, but it feels like someone is stabbing you over and over and over again in your eyeball. And it's just so insanely painful. And so it feels like physical pain. Physical. So, you know, our. Our pain receptors in our mind are all messed up because we've been feeding it these opiates. And so they have the feeling of euphoria. And so when they don't have euphoria, they don't have the drug inside of your brain, then your body assumes that you're in pain. And so everything's all messed up. And it takes about a week for it to reset itself. But people run away from that week of pain for decades of their life, because that's how unbearable that week of pain is.
Jonathan Cohen
The craving is. So it's so visceral.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right. And just to escape the physical pain. And, yeah, the mental addiction is terrible as well. And the worst withdrawal that I ever went through was from alcohol. That was the absolute worst. I had a bunch of seizures as a result. It was. It was terrifying. So, you know, there's only a couple drugs that you can have a physical addiction to, and that's opiates, benzos, and alcohol. But my mental addictions to the other drugs were absolutely insane. You know, methamphetamine totally destroyed my brain, and it made me think that I couldn't operate or do anything without a stimulant inside of me. So, yeah, you know, the process of getting through that first week of detox, if you can get through that, then you're looking forward to the next couple
Jonathan Cohen
weeks of what do you do in that week?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Nothing. You sleep. They might.
Jonathan Cohen
You pray to sleep, right?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Jonathan Cohen
That's all you want to do. Like being awake is bad.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I remember in one institution that I was in, I went up to the nurse's station and I said, I need more. Had a van, I need more sedation. And they said, no, you're maxed out, you can't have anymore. And I said, then find a rock and hit me over the head. I was just so ready to be knocked out because I could not sleep. And it really is so insanely. You know, sleep deprivation is insane.
Jonathan Cohen
So talk about what happens after that first week and then what happens at two weeks versus four.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, I think like maybe you can find a little glimmer of hope around four weeks. But the first month, everything is just so confusing. And you know, there's science that says that it takes 21 days to reroute a neural pathway. So I think that that maybe might be why they used to have people stay in for 28 days, because there's some science around it. And in 12 step rooms they say to make 90 meetings in 90 days because the science used to say that it took 90 days to reroute a neural pathway. So we need to create new habits.
Jonathan Cohen
Do they make you go to meetings there?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Sometimes the meetings come into the institutions. Yeah, I work for a.
Jonathan Cohen
Wouldn't you think that would be an important part of recovery is trying to give people tools?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Well, so, you know, now the model is not abstinence based recovery. The whole world of recovery is based around a harm reduction model today. And I won't get into like all my resentments against Big Pharma or anything, but please do.
Jonathan Cohen
We're very resentful.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
So, you know, they want, they want you to be on some sort of medication. So whether that's methadone or Suboxone or Vivitrol, they want you to be on a medication because that's how they make money. But really I've. I'm a product of 12 step fellowship. I'm a product of abstinence. And it's not easy, but it's way worth it. Way worth it. Way worth it.
Jonathan Cohen
Do you want to rail on Big Pharma for a second? I'm never going to defend Big Pharma. And I've seen all the documentaries. I've seen Dope Sick. Like, I've seen them all. And I'm just obsessed with this whole notion. And also, you know, this is. I mean, I think people should be marching in the streets over this. Like what, how, how, how, how. But, you know, I think something that is also true is that those medications are a crutch for many people who are not finding sobriety. And so for some people, for some people, it is a way to be entered back into society in ways that without it, they would not. I'm not advocating one way or another, and I happen to be a person who believes in the 12 step formulation, you know, and not Southern California 12 step, like just general, like sobriety. But it's very complicated, though, because I do know people for whom they get their kids back and they get, you know, aspects of their life back that, you know. I don't want to say that people who can't stay sober don't deserve to have lives, but it's very, very comp. It's a very complicated thing.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. And I will say this. You know, the drugs have changed, and so drugs are killing people. Like, drugs aren't getting people high, they're murdering them. And so the thing about using a secondary medication is that you won't die. And that's really what we want. We want people to stay alive long enough to figure out what does life look like? What does sobriety look like for you? So let's just at least keep them alive. So there definitely are benefits.
Jonathan Cohen
So you did this, let's say 12 times or so, over and over. And take us to what happened now. When you're kind of going about your life, you're doing all the things that you need to do, essentially right, to survive. How many times were you married?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
3. I'm quite a catch. They just throw me back and forth.
Jonathan Cohen
And you didn't have children?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No children.
Jonathan Cohen
Okay. Were you divorced at the time of the 2019 NDE?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Not divorced, but def. Not together.
Jonathan Cohen
Okay, got it. So you've lived this kind of 10 years, let's say, right or so. And now I want you to reframe for us, right? Here's your regimen of the drugs that you do. Also, I'm gonna ask a heroin question. How long does one bag last? Is that one experience?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Well, it depends, I guess, on the person at that point in time. I really didn't have a lot of money, so I was making a bag last just to not get sick, not to get high anymore. But heroin doesn't even exist anymore. The whole drug supply now is just fentanyl. So but you know, like, so the shelf life of fentanyl would be like a four hour high. Heroin would be like an eight hour high. But heroin doesn't exist anymore.
Jonathan Cohen
Okay, so you've got your regimen and you're in the bathroom.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. So after this kind of dark life review experience that I was having, I started to follow my father's voice and I go into the light and actually hold on. Okay.
Jonathan Cohen
Before we go there. So the only thing that I understand distinguishes your experience from a clinical NDE, as they usually are kind of classified, is typically, NDEs are overwhelmingly positive and don't have dark aspects. But I'm gonna go ahead and give Betty the benefit of the doubt here, because there could have been altered states of consciousness that occurred in a transition to what otherwise sounds like a completely standard issue nde.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Totally.
Jonathan Cohen
Does that feel accurate?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes, yes.
Jonathan Cohen
You can feel all the emotions. But I liked how you described the emotions as dense. Right?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
Which to me sounds like kind of like a visceral, like, you know, feeling all the things does. Is that clear?
Mayim Bialik
Absolutely. And just to walk us back into the story that you're going to tell, I don't know what day of the week it is. I'm imagining it's a Tuesday. I don't know why.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
It's a Wednesday.
Mayim Bialik
Perfect.
Jonathan Cohen
It was close.
Mayim Bialik
It's a Wednesday. You have to do laundry. You're re upping trying to make laundry less boring. You take more drugs than you normally take. And now you do. You start to feel sick. Like, walk us, like, through the moment.
Jonathan Cohen
Did the laundry get into the wash or did you not even get the.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
It did get into the wash.
Jonathan Cohen
So this is all happening with wet clothes.
Mayim Bialik
So the laundry. So you. You get high enough to go do the laundry. You come back into your apartment. I. I'm imagining. Because you're waiting for the laundry, and now you start to feel sick. Like, walk us into the moment before you get onto the bathroom floor.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. So, yeah, it started in the laundromat. I had taken the drugs before I went there. I live in Brooklyn, so, like, we don't have in. In the apartment, washers and dryers. So my laundromat was about six blocks from my house.
Jonathan Cohen
That's a long walk.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
And I went and I started putting. I put the clothes into the washing machine. I'm putting the quarters in. And then all of a sudden, I know something's not right. Just this whole body tingling starts to take over me.
Jonathan Cohen
But not in a good way.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Kind of in a good way, but then also in a super terrifying way, like, oh, I. It like a wave coming. Like, oh, this is not just gonna be a regular wave. This is gonna be a tidal wave. It turns into a tsunami. And I sort of had that awareness that something was about to happen. I tried to record myself on my phone. Cause I was like, this is gonna be crazy. I need to document this. And I couldn't. Cause they couldn't figure out how to use the phone. So then I leave the laundromat.
Jonathan Cohen
Tell me you're high without telling me you're high.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right. Right. I leave the laundromat, and I start running home like I'm booking it. Cause I know something terrible is about to happen. And it felt like I was stuck inside of a loop. I would make it to the corner, and I saw the street signs, and it said Stuyvesant and Madison. And then I run to the next corner, and it says Madison and Stuyvesant again. And then all the buildings around me started to crumble. And all that was left was the green lines of matrix code that make them up.
Jonathan Cohen
Wait, so you're. You're hallucinating or you're in the Matrix? Like, you're. I mean, you're out of the Matrix?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I feel like the way that I can conceptualize it now is that my soul took the VR headset off. Right. Like, all of our souls are just kind of chilling in heaven, and we have these VR headsets on, and we've fallen asleep with them on. Like, we've forgotten that we're inside the game. But in this moment, my headset came off, and I could see the whole architecture of the game. And then this bright white light came and just flooded everything.
Jonathan Cohen
And you're on the street.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I'm on the street. Losing my mind. Yeah, losing my mind. I finally made it back to my house, and I closed the door, and I was in the entryway, and I thought, oh, I'm definitely dead because this is like the movie Beetlejuice. I don't know how long it took me to get back here. I can't remember where I was before this. And I don't know what the heck is going on. And that's when I started to collapse and have all of these feelings take over my body, from my crown to my feet, just over and over and over again, this rapid firing of energy. Energy. And that's when the spiritual experience really started to take place. And I was downloaded with. I have language for it. Today I experienced a spontaneous Kundalini awakening, which is like this life force energy activation. My soul came online and activated for the first time ever. Definitely never was before. And so I saw the fabric of creation. I remember asking the question, why, why, why does Earth exist? Why this, why that? And just being downloaded with this.
Jonathan Cohen
What's the answer, Betty?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
So I guess like the short way to put it. And again, I came back with this two gig drive. Like I don't have the whole infiniteness, you know, I don't have a big enough hard drive for that, but it's bigger than mine. It was supposed to be this really fun place where we exchanged energy and we created so like a sim city that we were all collectively building together. The simulation theory is like a big part of my experience. And I like using video game analogy because I feel like it's, it connects with a younger generation that, you know, they all need this information too. They're having awakenings as well. If I'm having an awakening, they're definitely gonna have awakenings. So we all decided to create this thing together. And then some of the energy got imbalanced. Some of the divine feminine, the divine masculine, the shadow, the light. The whole idea of duality started to take place. We fell into duality. At first it was just this beautiful spiritual experience and we were all in our light bodies. And then the fall of, you know, the fall of creation was. I believe it was us falling into human form or believing that we're in human form, falling into a layer of the dream that we forgot that we were dreaming and we think goes really, really slow.
Mayim Bialik
You mentioned having a lot of questions on the other side. Did you have, were you a question asking person before this? Did all of a sudden, were you surprised that you had all these questions when you got there?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I don't know if I had a lot of questions. Why? Was definitely a question like why, why does this exist? I was acquisitive person, but at that point in my life, my whole life was just drugs. So my questions were more like, where can I get? How much money do I need? Who can I manipulate? But I had never pondered, what is the Earth experience? What does it mean to be a human? I had never had any quantum questions come into my mind. I didn't even have any vocabulary before my experience. It was just this long laundry list of drugs that I used and how much money it cost to be with me. I didn't need any other thoughts in my head.
Jonathan Cohen
This is one of the really fascinating components of NDEs is people often describe coming back and I want to get into some of your other kind of special abilities. Right? But one of the very unique things that we've often heard about and when we Spoke to Elizabeth Crone, who was struck by lightning and came back with very special abilities and changed her whole life and has precognitive visions and things like that. You know, the download that she received was not in her vocabulary, right? So she was on the pavement after being struck for a few minutes and had a world of information that was downloaded in those few minutes. Right. And that's what's so interesting to me is that, like, something is getting downloaded that definitely feels like it's from outside of Betty. Right. And when. When you describe these things, when Elizabeth, when a lot of people with ND's describe these things, they sound like Kundalini mystics. They sound like kabbalists, right? The Jewish, you know, Kabbalah system. They sound like theoretical physicists. Because if you talk to quantum people, and we talk to a lot of theoretical physicists here, they have almost an identical description from a different perspective, Right. From a transcendental perspective or from a mathematical perspective.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right.
Jonathan Cohen
And this notion of, you know, Thomas Campbell talks about, like, it's just all zeros and ones. And the way you've described it is like this, Betty, this is not who you are. This is the avatar that we call Betty. And in this iteration, you've been placed in this body. But tell us what you learned about your soul when you were in this state.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
So what I learned about my soul is that I'm part of a tribe. I have a soul family that I came here with. I learned that my soul planned my life before I got here, planned out all the major markers of my life. So all these big plot points that were gonna happen in the story of my life, these are some of the things that I learned about what a soul is. And, you know, how a physicist might have a different approach, how to process this information. Because I was a meth head prostitute when I entered the space of eternity, the only thing that they could do to help me understand about what is Earth and what is life was they just started showing me little clips of movies because that was the only. I needed pop culture because I had never read a book on philosophy. I don't know anything really. And so they showed me the Matrix, they showed me Inception, and they showed me what Dreams May Come. And they said, these movies are the blueprint. Stop it. Yes, yes. For reality.
Jonathan Cohen
So what?
Mayim Bialik
Dreams May Come is a fantastic and very underrated movie. A lot of people don't know about it.
Jonathan Cohen
So all of us Matrix heads who are like, this is really touching. And, like, the Wykowski siblings that, like, definitely Touch something.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Well, so you know, the Matrix is a modern day telling of Plato's allegory of the cave.
Jonathan Cohen
Of course it is.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right?
Jonathan Cohen
Of course it is, Betty.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Anybody knows these are things I know now. So the thing about, you know, the allegory of the cave and the Matrix, it's not about necessarily escaping the Matrix. We're not gonna do that. It's not gonna happen in this lifetime. We're not gonna escape the Matrix.
Jonathan Cohen
Not with that attitude we won't.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
That's true. Maybe if enough of us get together, maybe we can. But it's about manip the energy inside of the Matrix or not allowing the Matrix to win. So the, you know, it's a video game that we're inside of. The Matrix is the video game that we're inside of. And the big boss of the video game is the game itself. So am I going to be distracted by Matrix tricks like paying attention to politics or whatever's going on in the world? Are things that are totally out of my control or am I going to do what my soul came here to do? And that's to focus on my individual mission. To connect with the members of my soul family to do righteous things, to be of service and to live a fulfilled life.
Jonathan Cohen
Okay, I'm gonna ask you a hard question. I love you. First of all, like, this is amazing. I'm gonna ask you a really hard question. Some people think you're insane.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh, totally.
Jonathan Cohen
Some people think that people. And not just you. I don't mean to make it personal that people who had NDEs and who are like, I have a soul family. I came, I met God. Like, oh, you're what we call clinically insane. And western medicine knows how to solve that. And that's to sedate you. Like, you were on the wrong kind of drugs. Betty, we're gonna give you the right kind. That makes Big Pharma a lot of money. We're gonna quiet all that down. You're okay. Stop being so uppity. Stop trying to find your purpose. What you probably need is to get married and have kids, right? And like, you know, so what do you say when people hear your story and they're like, oh, that's a woman who had a mental breakdown because she was a poor drug addict prostitute and that's what happens. And guess she better pull herself up by her bootstraps.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
She's crazy. I never want.
Jonathan Cohen
I don't think that.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No, I totally. I hear you. I never want to be considered sane in an insane world. Never. I never, ever Want to fit into the box of what society says this experience is supposed to be like. And my life is awesome. Hello. I'm sitting here with you guys right now. Like, what the H. I used to be a homeless meth head prostitute strung out on heroin just six years ago.
Jonathan Cohen
Okay.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
And now I'm sitting here. This is like insane. Incredible. Incredible. So it doesn't. I don't surprise.
Jonathan Cohen
This is hell.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes. So, okay, on my two gig flash drive that I have, right, I had to bring in new belief systems, which means I had to delete some of the old ones. And one of the old ones is needing validation from other people. Some of the other things I had to let go of was guilt and shame about who I used to be and that those are some of the programs that I deleted in order to upload these new programs that I live my life by, which is living by spiritual principles, by being in recovery, by living a life led by spirit. So when people say there's this great TED talk, let me just reference this. It's called spiritual awakening or psychosis. And it's incredible. Incredible. And what this man says inside of his TED talk is that in indigenous cultures, when people start to hear voices, they cultivate that gift. They bring them to the medicine men and women of the tribe and they cultivate this. And in the Western world, we medicate, sedate, institutionalize, because we are so disconnected from spirit. And I think that. And I love LA because there's like a lot of woke people here. There's just like everybody is.
Jonathan Cohen
They're so woke.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
They really. I mean, there's a lot of people. I've walked down the street and people are talking about source and the universe and I'm like, this is wild.
Jonathan Cohen
Don't breathe in too deeply. You'll inhale ayahuasca.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
But I do think that there are these. There's mass awakening happening. If I was awoken, I know that something is happening on a bigger, big, large scale. This was not part of my story.
Mayim Bialik
Bring us sort of a little bit more chronological in terms of what you experience. So all of a sudden you were describing, you have this whole life review. You're seeing all these aspects of your life.
Jonathan Cohen
It's dense.
Mayim Bialik
It's very dense. It's. It's intense. You're seeing details of your parents suicide, which just is so painful. I can't even really imagine the intensity of the emotion that's happening. If you're seeing them write their notes and make that plan, how long does that feel like? Walk us. Let's really kind of dive in here and slow down. Like, help us understand what you're experiencing in that witness state.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, it felt like three seconds of time. Not even like a millisecond of time. I can't even conceptualize it in linear time. It was instant. Everything was happening instantaneously. It could have been 10 years that I was there, or it could have been 10 seconds.
Jonathan Cohen
Do you know how long the entire experience was?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Roughly around eight hours. Yeah, because it was daytime when I fell out and it was nighttime when I.
Jonathan Cohen
The clothes were in the laundry room.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
They were mildew. They were done. Yeah, they were.
Mayim Bialik
And when you're watching your parents, is that happening really quickly in the other realm or. But it feels really intense. Like, how are you processing it? It's just like this screen that things are flashing through. Like, describe it to us.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I mean, it's a download, the same way that you download something on a computer. Like, it's instant.
Jonathan Cohen
It wasn't there, and then it's there,
Mayim Bialik
but you're processing it in a way because, like, when it downloads on a computer, you have to kind of open it and review it. But. But it's not. It's, like, downloaded and instantaneous, and you feel it and you know it. And it's like all of a sudden,
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
yes, deep, innate knowing. Everything is just knowing. And, yeah, it kind of plays out like a movie a lot. And there's nothing actually going on. You're just in blankness. But then your mind's eye is creating all this scenery.
Mayim Bialik
So you see your parents. What else do you see? In that life review, I saw all
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
the women that I harmed. I harmed a lot of women in active addiction. Like, I would manipulate women. I'd get them strung out on drugs. I would probably prostitute them and prostitute myself. And they were all there, just like their faces, the pain, the agony, the emotions. And I was really witnessing the kind of person that I was. And, wow, really not a good person. I thought that there was no consequences to anything that I did. And then here I am being confronted with the consequences. The consequences being that I have to feel this. And even though it's instantaneous and it's not super terrible, no, I don't want to live the rest of my life like that. So the life review kind of caps at that. And then I start to hear my dad, and he's telling me that I'm worthy of all the love in the universe. And so I start following him. And this is where I'm introduced to the concept of pre Birth planning. This is how the scene shifts. And I find myself on what feels like the deck of a spaceship. There's thousands of other souls all around me. Yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
What'd the spaceship look like?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
The Gravitron ride from carnivals. Do you remember that? It's like a spinning disc that, like, you throw yourself up against the wall and, like, can go up.
Jonathan Cohen
Centrifugal force.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. Yeah. So like, I. Through the side of one of those walls. I don't know why that's important, but they always tell me to say it. Maybe it's like shifting through a parallel reality or that's just how close.
Jonathan Cohen
Oh, you broke through a barrier, which
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
is like, we're all so close. We're just one step away. Just like one little door into another realm. I'm surrounded by thousands of other souls. There's a commander in the center. This bright white light. And this commander is telling us that we're the most special volunteers. We've all signed up to go to Earth for the transformation of consciousness.
Jonathan Cohen
Stop it.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, this is. And. And I think that the light was Christ or Krishna or Buddha, whatever. Some sort of higher consciousness. Right. Source.
Jonathan Cohen
But didn't have a form.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No form, just a tube of light.
Jonathan Cohen
Tube of light. What color light?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Just white.
Jonathan Cohen
Like a pillar of light.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Pillar of light, yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
Biblical.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Very biblical. Yeah. And you know, like, I don't really know what's going on, but I know that I'm a part of it.
Jonathan Cohen
No one knows what's going on.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Nobody knows what's going on.
Mayim Bialik
What are the souls like? Like when you say there's thousands of. Just light bodies.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes. So like human shape, no gender, no features, just light.
Jonathan Cohen
No gender. No gender.
Mayim Bialik
That's what I was imagining. Keep going.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Okay, so again, I don't know what's going on, but I know that I'm a part of it. We're all stoked. We're so excited. We're like, planet Earth. Here we go. Like, everybody is so happy. And then my awareness shifts over to another scene and I find myself in front of a table of beings. These four beings. It was a crappy banquet hall table. Collapsible, like in a 12 step meeting. Yeah. And it was nothing ornate, it was nothing beautiful, nothing that you would expect in heaven. And I didn't know who the people were, but I knew that they were in charge of me, at least, if not all of creation. And they had this big giant book, and that was beautiful and ornate. What kind of book? It was like this big golden book. It was velvet. There was like. Like red velvet and gold all around it.
Mayim Bialik
Kashic records.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. And they were thumbing through it, and they said, it's really nice to see you. You're not meant to stay. You're only here for information. And I'm, like, looking all around me. I'm like, they're not talking to me, are they? Because I am definitely staying here. This place is tits. I love it. I am not going anywhere. And they said, nope, just information. And then they shoved me into another scene. And I find myself with this man. And he. Like an npc. He had, like, a little thought bubble come up on the top of his head, and it said, okay, let's pick your life. And he had this big, empty grocery cart, and he started. He starts pushing me through the aisles of a grocery store. And lining the walls of the grocery store aisles were these gigantic cereal boxes. And every cereal box had a life experience on it. And I'm this hungry little orb of light, this little soul. And I'm like, I'm going to Earth for the great awakening. Let's do this. And I just start grabbing every cereal box that I can get my metaphorical hands on, because there's no physical hands there. And I was grabbing really dense stuff.
Mayim Bialik
Like, how do you grab it with no hands? Just. Just. In it goes. You sink it. And there it.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Okay, there it is. And it goes into this cart. And I think that my imagery came through like this again, because it felt like a video game. And I think that, you know, this. This kind of description is helpful to somebody, right? Like, there's all these amazing Nders who have these super angelic, beautiful light experiences. Mine's kind of clunky, and I love it. I love the way that mine came through.
Mayim Bialik
For me, it feels a little like pop culture. It feels a little fast. It feels a little, like a lot of energy to it, definitely.
Jonathan Cohen
Okay, so shopping cart. All the experiences going there.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Addiction, prostitution, family trauma. I picked my parents, they picked me. And because I was coming to Earth for this great awakening mission, which is the transformation of consciousness, I had picked my family line because I was gonna be exposed to a lot of life lessons that needed to be transmuted for the collective itself, not just for me and that family, but for the whole collective. So as I heal and the one moment that I like to talk about a lot is that I picked this cereal box that said childhood sexual trauma on it. I threw it into the cart, and as I did, a little orb of light came out with the box. And that orb of light was the soul of the man who molested me when I was a small child. And we came orb to orb with each other, and we made this contract, and we loved each other so much. And again, my human brain cannot understand this at all.
Jonathan Cohen
We were just talking about this yesterday. Like, you can't understand what it means to feel forgiven in that realm. It's not like what we think of it now.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes. And also because there's no such thing as linear time there. That's. My soul doesn't know, like, oh, you're gonna deal with that trauma for 40 years of your life. My soul just thinks like, man, that was. That's a little uncomfortable. I can deal with it. And it happens in an instant. And. And the underlying message is always forgiveness. So that's like, what I think every soul is here to accomplish some sort of forgiveness. Forgiveness for the world, forgiveness for other people, forgiveness for themselves. And so that is one part of the story that I like to highlight, because out of all of the traumas that have happened in my life, now I'm experiencing this scene where I'm seeing that I chose all of it. All of it. All of these things that I felt victimized by my whole life. So now my chains of victimization are just completely broken off of me. And I feel like I could fly into the ether of outer space forever and ever. And I find myself back in front of the table of beings and I throw myself on the ground again. Like, my mind's eye is constructing everything. I don't have a body there, but I'm crying out to them, and I'm like, I can't believe this. This helps me so much. This makes so much sense. This is the information I've been waiting for my whole life. I'm not a victim to my circumstance. I am a divine co. Creator of my reality. Thank you so much. I will still not be going back to Earth because that place sucks. But I'm really glad that I have all this information. And they were like, no, you're going back. And I was like, no, no, no. Like, I'm good. This is totally, like, I love it here. I feel reunion. I feel bliss.
Jonathan Cohen
Did you have an awareness of the self? That was Betty at that point.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh, yeah. I could still see her body. Yeah, I could see. I could see my body actually on the bathroom floor. And she was naked and she was just. Yeah, sprawled out. Not a good look.
Mayim Bialik
Concerned about her at all. We were like. Like, can I go back into that?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
When I refused to Come back. And I kind of transformed into a small child. And I said, no way. I will not go back. You guys. Do not tell us what Earth is actually. Like, I've been lied to. I will not go back. And they were like, you say this every time that you come back home. You're always saying that we don't tell you, but we do. You just forget. That's part of the game is to forget.
Mayim Bialik
You specifically or you humans say this.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No, they were talking about me specifically, that I've been on Earth over and over and over again playing this game.
Jonathan Cohen
But in theory, I would imagine could be everybody.
Mayim Bialik
I think it's everyone.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Think of the oneness of everything. We are all the same soul, energy.
Mayim Bialik
And we all come back being like, no one freaking told me how painful this is going to be and how joints. But we.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
We do it over and over again. We do. We do it over and over again for fun.
Mayim Bialik
There's no game like it.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. And there's nothing to do in heaven. It's just like emptiness and fullness at the same time. There's just nothing to do there. So we're like, oh, Earth is on fire. Yeah, let's go there. That sounds fun. Fire. So. So when I was refusing to go back into my body, they said to me, well, you definitely have to go back. And I said, I can't go into her. Look at her. And we were like, all staring. I was like, she looks a mess. Like, I cannot. Don't make my beautiful spirit squeeze back into that horror show. And they said, well, if you don't go back into her, then you have to go back into a baby. And they showed me the baby that I would be born into.
Jonathan Cohen
And babies are a mess.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
They showed me everything about her. Like, a little screen of her stats came up next to next to her, and she was like slowly rotating just like an avatar in a video game. And it was her gender, her ethnicity, where she would be born, who her parents were, her traumas, her adversity, her
Mayim Bialik
purpose was gonna be born.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
She was gonna be born in the hospital right next to my house, where I was gonna die, where I was gonna be pronounced dead.
Mayim Bialik
Easy access.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes, easy. Like, right.
Jonathan Cohen
Slide that soul right next door or down the floor.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes. And I was like, in a really bad part of. Of Brooklyn. And like, I was gonna be born into the projects to teenage parents, and I was gonna have all these other levels of societal adversity. And I was like, I can't. I can't do it from zero. There's just no way could you ask
Mayim Bialik
for like, hey, isn't there a third option that wasn't presented? You're like, can't I get someone who has like a pool?
Jonathan Cohen
Are you Italian? Was it an Italian baby or.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
No, no, it was a little black girl. And I know that she exists somewhere, you know? Like, I know that she was still born and that somebody hopped into her, you know, it just wasn't me. Somebody took on that mission for sure. And so I couldn't have, like some lavish life because my life experience cart still needed to be experienced. So it got shoved into kind of like her frame. Like, okay, now she will be taking on your life challenges. So all the cereal poxes that you chose for yourself now will go into her life.
Mayim Bialik
Here's a question. If you had chosen not to go back into Betty, would Betty have died or would she have had of soul swap?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Ooh, that's a good question. I think that I know that body was really done. You know, that body had a lot of trauma to it.
Jonathan Cohen
You mean the body that we know as Betty?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes, this body. This body had a lot of trauma to it. So I don't know if there would be a soul brave enough to hop into that. I mean, obvious. I mean, of course there would be, I'm sure. But the way that I saw it, when they showed me the alternate timelines, they showed me that I died.
Jonathan Cohen
So then if you became this other baby.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
That baby would have to have some experience to get back to this spaceship existence in order for her to understand her existence.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Okay.
Jonathan Cohen
Like, it wouldn't be like modern. I'm calling you Betty because you're in the body that is Betty. But it wouldn't be like that orb has the consciousness of that orb. That orb would be a baby who's then going through life just like you did when you were Betty.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right. So here's the thing with pre birth planning, Right. Is it's not the pre birth plan is about these major plot points. So I could have. Here's three of my plot points. Addiction, recovery, spiritual awakening. I could have experienced those things very early in my life. Again, rehab, first time, 18. Okay? There's addiction, there's recovery. I would have had a slow and steady spiritual awakening as a result of practicing the 12 steps in a 12 step program. Cause the 12th step promises a spiritual awakening. No need for an NDE. No need for all the drama, no need for all the theatrics.
Jonathan Cohen
The naked on the floor.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right. So. But because I had waited, I had kept ignoring the internal GPS that said, stop, make a U turn. And so all of my plot points compounded on top of each other, and they all demanded to be experienced in one moment.
Mayim Bialik
Yeah, it feels like there's a lineup of souls waiting to come to Earth. And the longer they hang out there, the further they are away from what the reality of. Of Earth is actually like. It's like when you have a baby or a puppy, and then, like, enough years pass that you forget about the sleep deprivation. You're like, I should do that again, because they're amazing. It feels like there's like. Are they struggling to get souls down here, or is there a lineup?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I think that there is a lineup for sure. I mean, we've got 8 billion souls here now, so, you know, definitely people want to be here for.
Mayim Bialik
I mean, population is declining, beginning. Okay, is that because there's not a line of people souls?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Oh, I think that when, you know, this transformation, this spiritual transformation starts to take place, it's gonna be a much different reality than what we're in right now. I don't know exactly what it's gonna look like, but it's definitely gonna look different. And this analogy of childbirth is a good one to use for something like this. Right? So a woman gets pregnant, carries the baby. Super uncomfortable. I mean, I don't know. I've never had a baby in this lifetime, but, like, really uncomfortable. I'm sure it's super uncomfortable. By the end of it, you're like, oh, my God, murder me already. I want this to be over. Then you actually go through labor.
Jonathan Cohen
Like, the pain, the agony, this is worth in pregnancy. Then you have the baby. You're like, this is worth in labor.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Right? Right. So then you forget all about it, and you do it again. Right? Like, you forget all about it, because the reward is worth it. And so the reward of being a soul and coming here is that you forget so that you can remember. And when we go back to that space and we have remembrance again, we're like. Like, I want to forget and remember all over again.
Jonathan Cohen
You know that spot above your lip? There's a legend in, like, Jewish mystical thinking that when you are in your mother's womb, you learn all the secrets of the universe is the way they describe it. You learn the languages of the animals. You learn everything that could ever be known. And before you're born, the angel Lilith, which, like, you know, the angel Lilith touches you here, and you forget everything so that you can spend your entire life learning it.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Wow.
Jonathan Cohen
But that you have all the wisdom is held. But that's what they say that little spot is, is Lilith basically saying, wow, forget. So that kind of reminded me of that. I mean, there's so many mystical things that you say that are also like
Mayim Bialik
the Men in Black forgetting.
Jonathan Cohen
Also that just the thing. Here's a question. If you hadn't had that experience, what would have happened? Meaning, like, does everybody have their own path and that was yours because you have a special message? Or if that were to happen to me, which I wouldn't want it to happen in a bad way. God forbid. Bite my tongue. But if that were to happen to me, I might have a different experience. Your spaceship supermarket experience might just be yours. But what would have happened? Do you have any concept of that?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah, so I. Yeah, I think that it is individual to each person. I've met people who have had similar experiences, not in the same exact thing, but the more people that hear, you know, we have a message. Like people who have near death experiences, spiritual experiences, who feel brave enough to come out and share their experiences. Because there's a lot of closeted near death experiencers. Again, because society says, you're crazy, I'm gonna institutionalize you. So people will stay quiet out of fear. I have no fear. So I. I say whatever. But I do think that, well, I. You know, for me in particular, I saw what would happen to me, you know, if. If I didn't come back and, like, continue on this spiritual path, I would have died. And I saw this scene where I was dead on my bedroom. I was dead on the bathroom floor. My cousin came to my house to see why I had gone quiet for so many days. Because at this point in time, I was really heavy in active addiction. And everybody was very scared that I was going to die. Not that I had a lot of people in my life. My cousin was kind of the only person, but she was terrified. And at the time, she was eight months pregnant. And I saw this scene where she came into my house and she's screaming over my body. And then all of a sudden my soul leaves the body on the floor and goes into her unborn baby again. We're talking about the multiverse. So, like, a million things can happen at once, right? Even though I saw this scene with this baby in heaven, this was another scene that I had seen. And I thought, oh, God, I can't let that happen. Because could you imagine, like, having to breastfeed on your cousin to survive? Like, that would be so fun.
Jonathan Cohen
That's what you thought, Betty? Yes, definitely. When Your soul entered your cousin's unborn fetus.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yes.
Jonathan Cohen
That's what you thought.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I was like, I do not want to latch on. I'm not latching on for dear life on this one. That is not. We can't have this timeline happen.
Mayim Bialik
So life review. You have the option to go into the baby. You choose not to go into the baby. So you're told now that you have to go back. You accept this. You're like, it's either this new baby that you don't want to have to start from zero, or back into Betty on the bathroom floor. Bring us to that moment.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah. So again, I'm very. I feel very defiant in this moment, in this space. And they. They told me my awareness started to shift back into my body as soon as I made the decision that I can't start from zero. I'll go back into that glitched, broken body that I just came from. And I just kept telling them, I just want you to know that there's no way to fix her. She is beyond fixing. And they kind of held. It felt like they were holding my face again, like, I don't have a body there. But this is how it was coming in my mind's eye. And they said, listen, the first part of your life was boot camp. Nobody likes boot camp. It's brutal. It's raining sideways, you're doing a thousand push ups. Someone's shoving your face in the mud. There's a bald guy screaming in your face space. The second part of your life is going to be carrying out your mission. You're going to have soul mates, kindred spirits, mentors, teachers, communities. You're going to be safe and supported. You're going to be living in spiritual awareness. Your life is going to be so much better. Just trust us. And I was like, I do not trust you guys.
Mayim Bialik
Not after the first part.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Hell, no. I didn't trust any of this. And I just found my awareness back into my. In my. Inside my body. And I woke up on my bathroom floor. I kind of shook my head and I was like, wow.
Jonathan Cohen
Wow.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
I will never be that high ever again. That was crazy. I got so high that I thought I was talking to God. I thought I planned my life. What an insane thing.
Jonathan Cohen
So you thought it was some sort of hallucination?
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
Yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
We're gonna hit pause here, even though I really don't want to because there is so much more of this story I want you to hear. But that is what part two will be for. Betty has so much more to Share with us.
Mayim Bialik
We're diving really deep into the details, the really intense details of her near death experience and coming back to integrate that information.
Jonathan Cohen
We're also gonna talk about how she actually returned to using after this experience, since she didn't fully integrate it yet. And all of the signs, coincidences and episodes that led her to find recovery, literally, she found it on a subway. And we'll talk about that.
Mayim Bialik
The number of synchronicities that she experiences is so phenomenal. You absolutely need to follow for part two.
Jonathan Cohen
We're gonna talk about what methods of recovery she actually embarked on. She'll talk about 12 step programs. She'll talk about a course in miracles, something we've never talked about here. Also what religious and spiritual recovery she maintains. She's also gonna talk about special gifts that she came back with after this experience. She had access to auras, understanding other people's energies. She was receiving too much information from the universe. She talks about how to control that and she's going to talk about how she lives as a guided entity with angels and guides on this earth who really govern all of the life that she now enjoys.
Mayim Bialik
Make sure you're subscribed anywhere you're listening to podcasts for part two.
Jonathan Cohen
And make sure to check out Substack if you are not already on Substack. You're gonna wanna be there for more of this kind of content and discussions with the entire Breaker community, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
Mayim Bialik
It's Maya Bialik's breakdown.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
She's gonna break it down for you.
Mayim Bialik
She's got a neuroscience PhD or two
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
and now she's gonna break down.
Mayim Bialik
It's a breakdown.
Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
She's gonna break it down.
Release Date: August 5, 2025
Host: Mayim Bialik
Co-host: Jonathan Cohen
Guest: Betty Guadagno (Buddha Betty)
This episode features Betty Guadagno, also known as "Buddha Betty," who shares her harrowing journey through trauma, addiction, and a transformative near-death experience (NDE). Her story delves into themes of consciousness, the afterlife, personal accountability, spiritual awakening, and the capacity for radical change. Betty’s account is unvarnished and often shocking, spanning from childhood abuse and active drug addiction to profound insights gained through her NDE, ultimately leading her to a life of service and spiritual teaching.
On the Unique Nature of NDEs:
“Near death experiences are like fingerprints. They're super unique to each individual.” (08:40, Betty)
On Being Atheist Before the NDE:
“I didn't believe that anything happens after you die. I was a pretty staunch atheist, but I definitely wasn't expecting what I was experiencing.” (11:46, Betty)
On Trauma Shaping Addiction:
“My whole life I was just taught that if anything uncomfortable happens to you, don't talk about it, just medicate it and sedate it.” (20:40, Betty)
On Addiction as Soft Suicide:
“Addiction is soft suicide. So I wasn't gonna flat out do it, but I was absolutely ready for it at any moment.” (34:16, Betty)
On the Profundity of NDE Life Review:
“I started to experience every feeling that could happen, not just in my own life, but that happened on earth…every emotion, every experience was happening to me simultaneously, all at the exact same moment.” (11:46, Betty)
On Pre-Birth Planning:
“We all decided to create this thing together…at first it was just this beautiful spiritual experience and we were all in our light bodies. And then the fall of creation was us falling into human form…” (52:06, Betty)
On Becoming a "Divine Co-Creator":
“This is the information I've been waiting for my whole life. I'm not a victim to my circumstance. I am a divine co-creator of my reality.” (68:18, Betty)
On Return and Mission:
“The first part of your life was boot camp. Nobody likes boot camp. It's brutal…The second part of your life is going to be carrying out your mission. You're going to have soul mates, mentors, teachers…You're going to be safe and supported.” (79:11, Betty relaying message from the beings)
On Skepticism and Authenticity:
“I never want to be considered sane in an insane world. Never. My life is awesome—hello, I'm sitting here with you guys right now.” (58:48, Betty)
Betty’s incredible journey exemplifies the possibility of radical transformation through spiritual awakening—even in the wake of extreme trauma and self-destruction. Her narrative leaves listeners with questions about the nature of consciousness, the meaning of suffering, and the power we each have to shape our own story. The episode closes with a preview of Part 2, where Betty will discuss post-NDE integration—including continued struggles, new abilities, the role of spiritual guides, and deeper methods of recovery.