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More Than We See is a grounded, practical conversation about intuition as a human sense and capacity.
Hosted by Natalie of Immersive Spirit, this podcast blends lived experience, nervous-system–informed insight, and real-world tools to help people better understand how perception, sensitivity, and intuition are experienced—and how to work with them in everyday life across kids, teens, families, and adults.
Episodes explore the many ways intuitive awareness is felt and understood—from curiosity and excitement, to subtle noticing, to moments that challenge what we thought we knew. Along the way, conversations offer practical perspectives, simple tools, and steady ways of relating to intuition so it supports daily life rather than overwhelms it. This is a place to land for people who are curious, overwhelmed, skeptical, sensitive, living intuitively, or simply paying attention in a new way.
No hype. No dramatizing. Just clear conversation, lived insight, and practical ways of working with what we sense—alongside the quiet truth that there is more than we see, and that understanding it can make life feel steadier, clearer, and more alive.
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We’re dedicated to empowering you, helping grow, and authentically connect with your highest self, helping you to Live Your Soul! Find out more at ImmersiveSpirit.com
A hospice doctor named Christopher Kerr was caring for a woman named Mary. She was seventy years old She had four children, and she was nearing the end of her life…
Her family was gathered around her spending some time together when Mary suddenly started cradling a baby except there wasn't a baby there. She was holding this baby in her arms though kissing the head and calling him Danny. You can imagine her children's reaction. They had no idea what was happening They were looking at the doctor wondering if their mother was hallucinating or having some kind of weird reaction to the medication…
But Mary seemed perfectly happy. She was completely absorbed in a little baby, and Doctor Kirk didn't interrupt her He just watched. The next day Mary's sister arrived from out of town, and the family told her what had happened, and that's when they learned something about their mother that none of the four knew before. Years before they were born, Mary had delivered a stillborn baby boy. And his name was Danny And apparently, that loss had been so painful for Mary that she had never talked about it with her children.
And I keep thinking about why there must have been like for her everybody and everybody in the room Her children watching something that they couldn't understand…and then learning this enormous piece of their mother's life that they never even knew about. And Mary, who was dying, seemingly having this very happy moment…with a baby that she had lost decades earlier. Doctor Cur has written about this experience and how much it changed the way he approached people at the end of their lives and I can see why. Because what exactly was happening there? Was Mary remembering this baby was her mind giving her something she needed Was she experiencing something that the rest of the room just simply couldn't see?
And I have thoughts about that, obviously. But I also think it's worth asking the question. What really happens when we die? I'm Natalie and welcome to more than we see. And Zen's We're just a couple days away from sowen.
I thought this might be a good time to get into one of those conversations that take…
us in about a hundred different directions And perhaps on another podcast we'll discover more of those directions. Because death is strange We know it's going to happen to all of us and yet We spend a remarkable amount of time trying not to think about it until somebody we love dies or they get sick or something happens that makes the whole subject a little less theoretical. And then we have questions like I certainly do. So I wanna spend some time with those questions today and with some of the experiences that people report around death in general. Some of them are documented in hospice research Some are things I've encountered through mediumship and is something happened to me last year that we'll discover two together Trying to make sense of all of it So let's start with doctor Kirk because Mary's experience wasn't the end of the curiosity.
He and his colleagues at hospice and palliative care in Buffalo began studying…the end of life and all about the dreams and things that were happening with their patients. So they were studying what they called…
end of life dreams and missions. And one of the things I appreciate about this research…
is that they actually asked dying people what they were experiencing they were having those conversations, which sounds obvious Right But for a long time a lot of that information about this experience…came from doctors or nurses or family members describing what they had observed. And there's a difference between watching somebody talk to a person that you can't see and asking them what are they experiencing. In one study the researchers ended up with fifty nine hospice patients in their final sample. Most of those patients reported at least one dream or vision Nearly all described their experiences as feeling real and some of them Most comforting experiences involved people that they had loved who had already died. And here's something I found particularly interesting.
As the patients got closer to death those comforting experiences involving deceased people became more prevalent. Now this doesn't tell us exactly what's causing them The study wasn't designed to really establish that, but it does tell us that people are reporting these experiences and that many of them find those experiences meaningful. And honestly, I wish we talked about this a lot more Like I've experienced hospice with family members and I know quite a few death do us. If you spent time around people who are actively dying, you've probably heard some of the stories too. Like, Someone starts talking to their mother who's been dead for thirty years.
Someone says their husband was there last night or they tell you somebody's waiting for them. And sometimes…
the family gets a little frightened around that which I understand if you're sitting beside someone you love and they were suddenly talking to somebody, who you know has passed away they're not physically there That's a lot to process for the living people that are gonna continue on But what's interesting is that person having the experience isn't always frightened at all. Sometimes they're quite comfortable and sometimes they're talking about things that no one else in the room can even understand. I remember hearing…about a woman in her seventies whose mother would come and sit with her every night. And I kind of love that image actually, just her mother coming to sit with her. I think about how many of us no matter how old we get, would probably find something pretty comforting and having our mom there when things are difficult.
Of course I also wonder what the woman was experiencing, like was she seeing her mother as she remembered her Was she dreaming Was she fully awake? My son believes it's a release in our brain that just helps the transition. And that's where these stories get interesting to me because…
we have the experience, and then we have the different ways to try to understand it Like Doctor Kirk's research also includes experiences…that weren't particularly comforting either. Some people report distressing dreams or they revisit painful events in their life and difficult relationships some things like they're trying to work through unfinished business. And that brings me to another story I've encountered. There is a war hero…
hero who was describing somebody who was appearing to them as a foreigner and this foreigner was saying I forgive you. Like who did he believe that person was? What did forgiveness even mean in that moment Was there something in the military service that he was carrying? Like I don't know all of those answers and I don't wanna fill in the blanks just to have a dramatic effect story. The family had a lot of input interpretations around the theories of their dad or grandpa.
But I'm not sure. I do find it fascinating that experiences around death can involve things that seem to have mattered deeply to someone in their life, and it makes me wonder about something I've noticed in my mediumship. When I have communicated with people who have died and the subject of their experience of death has come up, there are some pretty familiar themes, but the details aren't always the same And I've noticed what people describe often seems connected to what they believe Like what they expected and what they have been taught. Which makes a lot of sense in some ways. We carry our beliefs and expectations through our lives They influence how we understand just about everything.
So why wouldn't they influence how we understand death? But then I wonder whether those beliefs influence the actual experience or whether they influence how we interpret the experience afterwards. And I don't know if we can completely separate those two things. I can think about somebody who has spent their whole life believing they'll be greeted by a particular religious symbol or someone who expects to see their family or someone who doesn't believe there's anything at all on the other side. Do they experience different things Do they describe similar things that using different language?
And what happens when somebody experiences something that they weren't expecting? Which I have experienced based on crossing over work that I've done But again there's so many different tangents that we could go Um
…this is a big topic so maybe another one for another episode But everything is so…different. For the participant and the witnesses that are gonna be a part of that experience…
So this brings me to something that happened to me last year, and it's really interesting that I look back on it now but I had a heart attack. And while I was in the emergency room there was a period of time when things were pretty intense. Like I remember my kids sitting against the wall at the foot of the bed, and I remember doctors over me telling me to breathe and yelling at each other and I remember this strange almost drugged feeling, But I was aware of everything that was happening around me I could see my kids. I could hear the doctors, and I could also see spirits. Now I need to explain something here because for me, seeing spirits…not necessarily an unusual thing I'm a medium I've had these experiences with spirits for years, but there were so many of them, and they were so incredibly vivid I remember looking down the hallway and seeing what seems to be like hundreds of people down to the right hallway.
They were lined up and there was a light at the far end of the hall and I remember thinking that I needed to help them. That's what I thought was happening Like I was in an emergency room And there were all these spirits and I was just trying to connect to see what I could do for them I even remember like sitting up in my bed and I I wanted to help and I don't remember the doctor stopping me which looking back as another part of the whole thing that I kind of find a little bit strange. I was aware of what was going on medically but I was also very focused on these people, and I wasn't having much luck connecting with them Like they mostly seemed to be facing another direction or walking away from me. I remember feeling like I needed to work. And at that point I told my kids that they didn't need to sit there through all of this.
I wanted them to go home and get some rest I told them I would be fine. Strangely I remember being calm and quiet but I remember the doctors being loud and calling for different things over top of me. I most certainly wasn't sitting up in this right Was I? Like, eventually that enormous amount of spirits seemed to go back to kind of what I normally see So like the. When I'm in a hospital I often see spirit…
But again it was like hundreds at that time. But then it just started kind of going back and kind of coming in and out of that that drug induced state is what it felt like. Is straight Like I didn't take anything I don't know what they gave me So like I I can't really speak to that but I was seeing what I would consider a much more normal number for me and more in that wispy or shimmer like aspect. Um so not so vivid. And that was that.
At least that's how I understood it at the time Like I didn't come out of the hospital announcing that I'd had a near death experience. It didn't even occur to me I thought I had been in an emergency room where there was a whole lot of spirits, and apparently everybody just needed something, which if you know me probably isn't a terribly surprising interpretation. Is only later that I started thinking about the hallway and that light and all of those people and I thought wait a minute. Was that about me? Was I having some kind of experience?
Or was I in a place where spirit had the opportunity to connect with me in a way that I just wasn't accustomed to or was something else happening entirely? Like I still don't know One of my sons even this week mentioned that he thought that that was one of my exit points for me and he's glad I'm still here And I haven't discussed the new found light of the NDE situation. I just smile and tell him me too. And I think part of what makes this so interesting to me is that I didn't experience it as some dramatic thing where I was being invited to cross over I wasn't thinking about dying. I was thinking about helping.
Now I also understand that I was having a medical emergency there is physiological and medication related possibilities deserve consideration and I can't tell you exactly what was happening in my brain or my body at that moment. I also don't know whether I was medically close to death in a sense that researchers would use that as a study for near death experience. But I know what I remember experiencing. And I know that my understanding of that changed…
my thoughts about it That's what keeps me curious because if I already had a framework for understanding spirit did that affect what I thought I was seeing? Like someone else may have interpreted that same exact experience being different. Maybe. I don't have no idea actually, because…that's just my experience. And I wonder whether the people who report seeing deceased loved ones, near death…
are experiencing something similar to what I had, something entirely different or several different things that happen…that might have some feature in common. There's also an important distinction here The experiences Doctor Kerr studies, um, were happened to people approaching the end of life often over days or weeks like near death experiences are generally discussed in connection with an acute medical crisis, um, where you know it just is perceived a little bit different So those aren't automatically the same thing but they do raise the kind of overlapping questions about consciousness or perception or memory. And what people experience…when their bodies are under extraordinary stress. And I think it's worth exploring those questions without feeling like we have to solve them today because we're probably not going to solve all of death in a podcast episode, although that would be quite a productive Thursday. But there is another part of this conversation that I wanna make sure we make room for.
So we have talked about…
excuse me. What dying people sometimes experience? But what about the people who are still here afterwards? Like…what about the person who has lost their husband and suddenly dreams about him…so vividly that they wake up feeling like they actually spent time together…
or the person who walks into a room and feels their mother's presence, or somebody who hears a familiar phrase at exactly the moment they needed to hear it. I've heard so many stories like that over the years, and I know people understand those experiences differently. Some see them as communication some may understand them as a memory or grief or some way that their mind is continuing that relationship with the people we've lost. And sometimes people aren't particularly interested in explaining them They're just grateful that they get to have those experiences. And I understand that too.
I also wanna say something to anybody listening who has lost somebody…because I know this conversation may feel different to you. Maybe you're interested in the research maybe you're curious about near death experiences, or maybe you clicked on this episode because you missed somebody, and you wanna know if they're okay. In the mediumship sessions that I've done over the years, one of the things that comes through most consistently is reassurance. People I experience as communicating from spirit want their loved ones to know that they're okay that they're safe That they love them and that they know that they're missed. And if you're listening because there's somebody you wish you could hear from, I wanna share something from my experience.
They know you wanna hear from them too. That's what I've experienced in my work And it's something…
that I just wanted to say today. And if you haven't had a dream or a sign or any kind of experience that you recognize, please don't take that as meaning you're doing something wrong or that your relationship mattered less. Grief is hard enough without giving ourselves another thing to worry about And I think that's one of the reasons conversation like this matter. We have all of these ideas about what death is supposed to look like what we're supposed to feel, and what we're supposed to experience afterwards. But the actual human experience is a lot messier than that Some people have extraordinary experiences Some don't Some find them comforting and others find them confusing or scary.
And sometimes what we believe about those experiences changes over time I know mine has. I'm recording this just before Salin which is a time that traditionally is associated with the changing of the seasons, and with the relationship between the living and the dead. In modern spiritual practice you'll often hear people talk about the veil being thinner at this time of year. I work with spirit throughout the year so I don't personally need October to have a conversation about the dead. But I absolutely appreciate that we have a season when people are a little more willing to talk about these things.
And I'm going to be in White Fish Montana for a live event maybe including some mediumship on October thirtieth, this subject is very much on my mind. I've been thinking about the stories people carry the people they miss and what happens when somebody has an experience that doesn't fit into what they thought they understood. And I keep coming back to Mary and Danny. I wonder what that experience meant to her. I wonder what it meant to her children after they learned about that baby that they'd never known about.
And I wonder how many experiences happen in rooms like that or somebody sees something or hears something, and the people around them aren't quite sure how…
or what to make of it. I don't think we're gonna answer what really happens when we die today I'm not even sure we'd know, um when we had a complete answer not scientifically anyway, but I do think these experiences deserve our attention, and I'd love to hear from you Like have you been with somebody in a near death experience or the end of life and seen them speak with somebody, or have you had an experience yourself that made you question…what you thought you already knew? You don't have to have an explanation I'm just interested in what happened and how you understood it You can share it in the comments And if you're new here, welcome. I'm glad you found me. This is more than we see And I'll see you next time
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