Rev. Karen E. Herrick, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Children of Alcoholics, Inc. in Red Bank, New Jersey. After her master’s degree in social work from Rutgers University, she began to educate families on the disease concept of alcoholism. Dr. Herrick developed a successful private practice eventually seeing all types of people with psychological problems including addictions. She is now living in Fernley, Nevada, outside of Reno.
Karen wrote her book You’re Not Finished Yet which encapsulates her private practice work plus an additional two chapters on spirituality and spiritual experiences after she had a Holy Spirit experience during Holotropic Breathwork training.
Karen completed a PhD in 2008 at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her thesis was entitled “Naming Spiritual Experiences.” She writes that 75% of the 133 mental health professionals she researched stated that they believed further education regarding spiritual experiences, near-death experiences (NDEs) and after-life experiences would be beneficial to them personally and professionally.
The mental health professionals she researched indicated they needed more networking opportunities. She hopes to aid in a consensus that spiritual experiences are happening, which will increase discussion and raise the percentage of the population from 40-50% of having these experiences to well over the 50% mark. In doing so, she will bring a 1880’s term “sane hallucinations” into the world of psychology in order that people will understand that healthy people have the experiences of seeing their deceased loved ones and that they are not abnormal.
During her therapeutic practice, she encourages some clients to visit with mediums to help them handle their grief and the loss of loved ones. She was ordained at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and uses her Interfaith ministry to engage in the spiritual psychology of William James, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow.
In this interview by Lucy Forsting, with Synergy Connection Radio, Karen explains the importance of the vagus nerve, a part of the nervous system that is connected with spiritual experiences and why listeners need to understand how this nerve contributes to our health and wellness. Karen has found that this nerve is the seat of spirituality and spiritual experiences in releasing the spiritual body containing the soul from the physical body. She wants us to know that gravity has no effect on the spiritual body.
A transcript of the interview follows the audio controls.
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Transcript of the Interview
Alright, so welcome back, Karen. And we’re going to be discussing, of course, how the vagus nerve works. And you mentioned before we started the recording, how this impacts those that are grieving the loss of a loved one, because the parasympathetic system, which the vagus nerve is a part of, is, it touches every single organ in our body, which I think a lot of people don’t understand and don’t appreciate. And certainly, if we’re going through any type of grief, whether it’s, you know, trauma that was done to us, or the loss of a loved one, I’ve had both now, so I can experience that. but it makes a big difference in how, I don’t know, your diet, the way you absorb food and nutrition, the grieving process itself as far as depression or anxiety. So welcome to the show again, and let’s delve in and see what you can explain to us about how this nerve works.
Okay, so thank you, Lucy, for having me again. It’s always a pleasure. And I think we talked a lot last time about the vagus nerve in your physical body. The big news too, is that they have two bodies, they have a physical body and a spiritual body, which we’re really not taught a lot about. And the spiritual body, the only purpose for it is to take your soul over to the other side. Because your soul is immortal, it does not die. And so it needs to have a car vehicle to take it there. Can I have a Lamborghini to take me to the other side? Can I have a Lamborghini maybe to take? Hey, you can imagine anything you want. In fact, Jung encourages that it calls that active imagination. Okay.
So we have this spiritual body and it houses the psychic centers of the physical body of the spiritual body in the physical. There is an illustration I don’t know if you’re going to be able to show that to them, but they can also look through peruse my last book, the psychology of the soul and the paranormal, and it will show them a spiritual body illustration in the physical body if they want to see it. (See below.)
So what we have now is we have evidence for life after death. And so what is that we have near death experiences where people are going to the other side, some of them are having a spiritual where they see the light, their grandmother, their loved ones, and they come back. And sometimes when they come back, they have greater gifts as far as maybe being clairvoyant, being able to see different vibrate vibrational levels here that they didn’t see before.
So we have near-death experiences, and we have after-death communications. So those are called ADCs. So if your mom dies, and she always liked red cardinals, she tells you when I you know, if there’s a life on the other side, I’m going to show you a red cardinal, especially on my birthday or Mother’s Day or whatever. And it these things happen to people. So the red cardinal comes and stays on your shoulder for an hour and a half, which is very unusual. And, and, and your faith is increased that there is life after death. Now, that’s if you believe, right. And you’ve had a mom who’s taught you that kind of stuff. But ADCs, people see coins, they ask their loved ones for parking spaces. They just make their loved one a part of their life because they have had these different physical signs that come.
Reincarnation, America is not big on reincarnation. I think about 25% of the population supposedly believes in it. Younger people from 18 to like 26, they seem to believe in it. And then I don’t know what happens to them. But a lot of people that leave their body, they have a life review, where they have a movie where they see their life from this birth till, you know, till right now. And then a lot of them see their past lives. So some of those people that have near-death or out-of-body experiences now believe in reincarnation because they’ve been shown another life, right? Then you have mental mediumship, where mediumship is where you go to a medium or a psychic, mostly mediums, speak to dead people. And psychics are where you ask, where did grandma hide the money in the attic before you sell the house? Those those kinds of questions, and the medium. So the mental mediumship is how we do it now. Years ago in the 1800s, they would produce maybe another voice or another body that would talk to you, but we don’t do that so much anymore that I know of anyway.
We also have had research from the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies in Las Vegas, where someone won half a million dollars for the best paper on why he believed in life after death. Wow. So if you want to go on to that, BICS, B I C S, Las Vegas, Nevada, the Institute of Consciousness Studies has all of those papers that people wrote a couple of years ago, I think there were 29 winners. And everybody had studied the paranormal for at least five years to have written these. So we’re getting more and more information and also the American Psychiatric Association has just published a book or probably this last year called Death is an Altered State of Consciousness, meaning there is something after psychology has never admitted that ever. So that’s a that’s a brand new thing and I’m hoping to do a webinar on that book.
I have just moved from New Jersey to Nevada. So right now I’m a little bit just in the middle of boxes. But a couple months I wanted I want to do that because that’s very important for therapists to understand that psychology now is saying there’s something else because of all these stories we’ve heard for 200 years.
Can I share something with with you? Because I don’t work. I haven’t done this, I don’t think with you. But when my husband died, which has been over six and a half years ago, he knew that I believed in vibrational frequencies, that we are just a physical being housing, as you said, our soul and this frequency moves on after our death. He knew I believed that. And so one of the things that happened is he was able to literally block my phone from getting two phone calls from he was in hospice, which was about 10 minutes from me, he blocked that I didn’t find the phone messages there until afterwards. And his son who lived 40 minutes away, he also blocked it from Gary’s phone. So neither one of us were informed that my husband was going through transition. So he wanted me to come after he died. But here’s the kicker. He had something called pericardial effusion three and a half years before his death. And he was always cold. He was pretty much white because of this cold condition. And it was because with pericardial effusion, you have 500 or he did at least 500 ccs of fluid that was crushing his heart. So when they took the fluid off of his heart, then he just never was warm again, the circulation changed.
After his death, and the nurse that was there that greeted me because his daughter called me from Minneapolis, and she said, “Has the nursing home has hospice reached you?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “Well, dad is transitioning.” So that is how I found out. So I called them and it was after hours, it was on a quarter of 11 at night. And they said, we’ve been trying to reach you. That’s how I found out that there were indeed two phone calls. And I get there and he had passed about five minutes before I arrived. I think what he wanted to show me then was the difference between his life as he knew it and I knew it and death because when I walked in and picked up his hand, his hand was warm for the first time in three and a half years. And his face had color, and it had not had color for three and a half years. And the nurse could not figure it out. And I just smiled because I said he’s just showing me what we’ve talked about and what I’ve always known. It stayed that way.
More importantly, until one o ‘clock in the morning, it did not change until the coroner arrived, because this is on Halloween of all days. And he arrived at one o’clock in the morning. And only then after they had put him into this very lovely quilted bag, and they let me say goodbye, then his face was white. But up until then, his hand stayed warm, and his face had color.
Wow, I love it. Isn’t that a cool story? I mean, you know, and there’s so many other stories that I’ve had from people over the years that have told me similar kind of things.
But that one because it happened to me, I was just like blown away. I know, I didn’t feel warmth in his hand after three and a half years, three and a half years. So I mean, your your vibrational frequencies, your soul can make anything happen. I and I don’t quite understand maybe, as a therapist myself, I have some ideas as to why we don’t understand this and make it work for us while we’re alive. But certainly after death, we can come in there and make anything happen. I think prior because of the complexity of who we are, those frequencies, in fact, I was explaining this to somebody the other day, that is a client. And I said, it’s just like your EKG, little blips on, you know, our lifeline, if you will. And every time we get a little blip, that is a trauma of some kind, somebody doesn’t love you, somebody dies, somebody doesn’t invite you to a birthday party, it changes the frequency of your entire life. And so from birth to death, we have so many little blips, you know, in our life. And if we don’t grasp and release those negative moments from our lives, then the frequency can’t change. But it can change at death. Does that make some sense?
Makes a lot of sense. And what is wrong with one of the thinks is wrong with our culture, is that we don’t talk about vibrational frequencies and how they come in and out of us, right. So I love it when you start talking about that. Because I always talk about the law of vibration, we all have different levels of energy. And we need to know that and people know that when they’ll meet somebody at a restaurant, say, well, doesn’t she or he don’t they have great energy, don’t you just, and they have vibrational energy is individual. Right. So I love it when you start talking about that.
And then when you mentioned the anxiety that these football players had, you were working with. That’s where the vagus nerve can really help you in your everyday life with your physical body is in the vagus nerve breathing, where you breathe into the count of four, and then you breathe out as long as you can go. And that will lower your anxiety. And I do that at night when I can’t go to sleep, or if I decide I’m not going to read a book, I’m just going to breathe. And it really helps that. And that helps you calm yourself down. So you’re actually using your breath, and in vibration with your body that’s like this, in anxiety, and you’re calming it down, because Darwin said that the stomach tells the brain danger, danger, and your heart rate goes up. The pneumogastric nerve, which is another name for the Vegas.
So yes, he was right. And that’s why I even started to study it. Because it’s in psychology, you can help somebody with anxiety or depression or panic, if they if they use their breath. So that’s the biggest thing that the Vegas does for you at any time. So if you’re afraid of cats, and you see a cat, just know, hey, I’m safe right here. I’m in my car, what can the cat do to me, I’m going to breathe and practice it. Just practice that kind of breath to calm yourself down. So this vagus nerve has really helped me help people of, you know, dysfunctional and alcoholic homes.
But then I started, I’ve always been interested in psychics and mediums. And I’ve always had fun. I used to live in California. And there seemed like it was a psychic fear every weekend. And we just had a good time. So and then of course, I’ve lost a child, my oldest daughter is on the other side, and, and a couple of husbands, even though I was divorced from them at the time, but they’re over there, too. So I’ve gone to mediums. And sometimes I just go for fun. And maybe somebody comes in, you know, and I have mediums names of mediums, if they’re interested, they can always email me.
So anyway, if a client comes in, who’s lost Charlie, let’s just say, so when they come in, I’m, of course, I meet them, I tell them, I’m sorry, I am for their loss. And how long has it been? And, you know, circumstances of the loss, and tell me about Charlie. Because that’s what somebody wants to do if they’re in grief. They want to talk about Charlie. And so then and then after, you know, we get to know each other a little bit, I said, What do you think happens to people when they die? Well, and they always have an answer. Now, I don’t know if that’s because I always work with people from dysfunctional homes. And what they’ve learned from why did people from dysfunctional homes have more near-death experiences that people that would didn’t live in a dysfunctional home. They had them because they could disassociate easier. And then if they were on the cardiac table, having an operation, they would have more have more of a chance of having a near death of leaving their body, because they came from dysfunction, where they didn’t have to stay in the room mentally. So that’s one of the benefits of coming from a dysfunctional family or an alcoholic or drug-addicted family, that you’re going to have more spiritual experiences than the average person.
So when people came to me, I ran the Center for Children of Alcoholics. So they all came from dysfunction that I knew of, and all had, even though they didn’t know it, an ability to disassociate easier. So they would say yes, they knew where they had an idea where people go when they die. Some people don’t but so they’re one step ahead in that process. And then I asked, Have you had any signs of loved ones? Since he’s passed? Oh, I smell his, his cologne. I smell the cigars in the study. You know, there’s there’s always something. And Raymond Moody said within the first year of grief, a widow experiences two-thirds of widows experience some type of signs from their, you know, husband, deceased husband. And then, of course, I always want to see a photo and they usually have photos on their phone. So we just talk about that. And then I asked them if they would like to receive a later on in our process, information about scientific research that supports life after death.
So I leave that open. And I also Yes. I mean, why wouldn’t they, right? Okay, so when you have this spiritual body illustration in front of you, or if you can look at the cover of my third book, you will see that the vagus nerve comes in at the top of your head, goes down around your neck, touches your amygdala, which is fight, flight or frozen feelings, then goes down into your heart and then down into your stomach. So So, I believe that when the spiritual body, when the soul is ready to leave the vagus nerve starts to vibrate, and I’m going to give you, and it becomes the tunnel.
Let me read you a story if I can find it. Yeah, here it is. This was a guy who worked in an office, and he was just working with Robert Monroe, who was from Virginia. And Monroe started an organization where people could go and learn to leave their bodies. Because in the 1950s, 60s, I think he was, or maybe 70s, he had, Robert Monroe is an author, you can read some of his books, he would leave his body on Sunday when his wife went to church. And he got so he could leave his body on command. All these people to come, and they just helped him and volunteered. And then he started this organization where people now can go and learn how to leave their physical body if they want to. This was a gentleman who was an office manager, and he had a shooting through the tunnel experience.
I am going rapidly now through a tunnel. I was standing straight and now I am just sucked up through this tunnel is very narrow and I am rapidly shooting through the tunnel. Now I see a point of light at the other end. That’s the top of your head, the top chakra. I am he didn’t say that I did. I am it is helping to propel me I am coming out. I am going into a different dimension. And I have just completely slowed down. And I am right at the opening of this point. And now I am gently coming through and everything is green. It is so bright and it all is almost blinding. Because coming of coming out of the dark tunnel it’s a different feeling now it is a really strong energy that seems to be pressing against me it is a great feeling now this is a new energy level I feel strong everything around me is green it is so bright that it is taking me a minute to adjust and to absorb where I am.
So that’s just an average office manager who was practicing leaving his body and talked about the tunnel. And now I’m just going to read to you what I think after all my research happens to the vagus nerve as the soul is leaving the body, okay? And then you can ask any questions you want.
Around the ears, they usually hear a whirring noise and this sends out an impulse to change rotation of the body. The vibration is now getting stronger. This activates the sacrum through the vagus in the middle of our sympathetic and parasympathetic sections of the nervous system as chemicals are being released. And this energy pierces the center of one’s skull where the medulla oblongata and the pineal gland open the top chakra. People usually hear a click in the head area, which results in leaving one’s body and expanding one’s consciousness with an out-of-body or near death. This bodily energy would be like the energy that powers the orgasmic response and this magnetic operation depends entirely on the pure effort of the soul using the spiritual etheric body.
So it’s like being born to another place.
You know what I found kind of interesting is the color because green you know as you exit the body. If you think about the heart chakra, that is green. And so moving into green would kind of lead me to think that you’re moving into the intuitive part of who you are.
That could be Yes. Everybody, everybody probably has a different experience. Because your soul determines, I believe, the spiritual experience that you have, or whatever it is that you do experience.
The other thing I was wondering, when I was doing some studying with the different chakra levels, I’m evidently connected to the 11th chakra, and there’s 12, and 12 being divine. But because I’m a healer, one of the things that happened, that was scientific in the sense that I was in ICU when this took place. And this was three and a half years before my husband died, that he had this pericardial effusion. So they didn’t know what it was for the longest time. And most people would have died with that when you do have it, it’s usually not diagnosed until death. And then they go, Oh, wow, this is what it was, right, his case, he had been to two other hospitals, and those hospitals misdiagnosed him and he still stayed alive. So the third time was when they discovered it. And that’s when they told me he had an hour and a half to live when he was in ICU.
So at that point, the doctors left me and the heart monitor was right behind him with his oxygen level. And the reason that they said he could only live another hour and a half was his legs had already started modeling. So up to his knees, they were more purple than they were anything. And they knew that he had an hour and a half of oxygen left in his body, and that his heart would eventually stop. So the 78 % oxygen, they couldn’t do surgery to take the fluid off of his heart, because your oxygen level for surgery has to be 98%. And it’s not putting a mask on you and giving you oxygen, which is what I thought. It’s actually a cellular thing. And so the cells have to be at 98 % or you die during surgery. So they leave me with him and go back to the nurse’s station thinking that I’m going to be there roughly an hour to an hour and a half, and then he would be deceased. Instead, I heard a very clear message in my, my head, my brain, put your right hand on his top of his head and put your left hand on his heart. And because I’m a healer, I knew they wanted me to send in energy. And I go they because I’m guessing this is my spiritual guides, right. So I did that. And I just get very quiet. And I started sending energy in, it literally took 30 seconds for his oxygen level to go from 78 % to 98%.
And the doctors ran down the hall, I could hear him coming. And they said, What are you doing? And I said, I’m doing energy work. And I just left my hands there. And they said, Well, we can take him to surgery now. Don’t stop. But the doctors told me later, they said what you did is impossible. And I thought that was so interesting. Because I went, you say it’s impossible. But you took him to surgery, you took 500 cc’s of fluid off of his heart, you put in a pericardial window, had I not done what I did, you could not have done what you did. And they had no answer except that it was impossible. They had never seen anything like this.
Right. So they’re not used to miracles.
They’re not used to miracles. And yet they happen every day.
They do. Yes. One study in 2004, said, these doctors that were interview, they said 55 % of them had seen miracles, that the exclamation they get they add. And that happens right in in our different frequencies.
It does. And I think when you can get into one of those frequencies, and ideally kind of live there, stay there. You know, your life can be totally magical. Because it’s not just the law of attraction, with creating what you want in life, it’s really being part of life, which is magical.
Well, you know, it’s interesting, because Oprah, during one of her spiritual shows, about 45 minutes into said to this gentleman, you know, I get good ideas in the shower. Can you tell me why? And he said, No. And she said, Well, you know, people say it’s because the warm water is hitting the back of my neck. And I said, Yeah, I’m sitting in the family room, you know, folding laundry. And yeah, it’s hitting your vagus nerve. And that’s why she got the great idea. So I should get the good idea. So that’s important that people know that really good ideas. That’s your intuition, right? And that you do have spiritual guides, you do have loved ones up there that may be still trying to help you. And they give you thoughts, they cannot talk, but they can give you thoughts. But in realizing that you get thoughts that aren’t your own. Right. Carl Jung had a guru that came to him at night in his dreams and fill him on and he said to him one day, you know, you’re so arrogant. You think that every idea in your head is yours. And you really have to think about that. Because I get ideas that aren’t mine.
Right, right. And but that’s a really neat point to that you should make really about the vagus nerve. And that’s how you get the ideas. They come in on these physical psych, spiritual psychic centers in your body. And the best place is right around your ear. So right around your neck, is where you might hear a voice or an eye, you know, you might have a thought. So your intuition, and the more you develop that, and listen to those thoughts, is you’re going to have a better life, because you can kind of depend on your intuition, or write it down. And when you’re sitting in a car, when you’re standing in a shower, you’re in a standing meditation position. When you’re sitting in a car, you’re in a sitting meditative position, you get great ideas in the car, too. And if you don’t write them down or make a note somehow, on a napkin or whatever. And in the shower, as soon as you get out, write it down, because it’s gonna leave away. Yeah. And so they gave us these short hints about our life.
And Um, well, you know, the things that has happened over and over through, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years, is people will simultaneously in different parts of the world have the same thought. And, you know, so it’s just whoever acts on it, you know, quickest, you know, that it becomes their multimillion-dollar ideas, so to speak. But you know, whether it’s how to save a life or how to create something that is going to make a difference in the world, we get these collective ideas. And I think it does come in on streams of consciousness from the powers, you know, that be. And if we’re tuned in, you know, so we have like an AM station and an FM station. If we’re tuned in to that higher frequency, we get more of those wonderful ideas that are out there.
Right? It comes in on waves. And you know, it’s up to you to pick them up. Rachel Maddow, she’s a political consultant on I think CNN. I don’t know. She said she gets such good ideas in the shower. She doesn’t want to get out.
Well, she can have a whiteboard in there maybe with permanent marker.
So but it’s so important to people, you know, to know that, I think that everybody there. James said, there was this invisible world, William James, the father of American psychology. There was this invisible world all around us. And I often think about that. Yeah, yeah, I believe that, you know. And if you do believe that you do listen better. What modality, if you just listen to all these wonderful stories that people have, I just taught a grief workshop the other evening. And one of the therapists said that her mother’s favorite flower, believe it or not, was a dandelion. And she was up by the Arctic Circle, got out of the car, and right on the on the dirt road was this dandelion growing in the Arctic Circle. Wow. And I said, Do you see everybody gets a different spiritual experience? Oh, my goodness. And that was wonderful. And then everybody, one other woman at the end, the next day said, I couldn’t believe the stories. I said, Yeah. And people have them.
You know, and they’re more free, I guess I would say, to discuss them today than ever before. Right? You discuss these same kinds of stories. 150 years ago, 200 years ago, you were probably if you were a female, you were a witch, and you were burned at the stake. And so women do have usually a higher level of intuition than men do. Because men were born more to, you know, hunt, and to war, you know, kill territorially, defend their property, defend their homes and their families. So their way of doing things was totally different than a female’s. But I think that’s why so many women were burned at the stake as they used their intuition, they had knowledge, and yet the world wasn’t ready for it at that point.
Yeah, they had some knowledge, but they couldn’t explain it. No, no. You know, the devil. Yeah, yeah.
Well, Karen, our show is over. So can you maybe share with people how they can contact you? And of course, I have all that information also on the synopsis at the bottom. So people can refer back to that as well.
Yeah, I just sent you some changes to that. Okay. So the best way to get me right now is through email. Karen at Karen Herrick, H -E -R -R -I -C -K dot com. And I do my email at least twice a day, and then I can get back to you. And there’s always KarenEHerrick.com, which is my website. And I have 20-minute lectures on there that are free about the vagas. And then you can see some of these illustrations too. And also some lectures or more interviews where I’ve interviewed people or they’ve interviewed me. And I can learn a lot that way from the website and my YouTube channel.
Well, you will be back on the show in the not-too-distant future, and we’ll continue this wonderful conversation that we’re having about understanding how to, I guess, get in touch with the vagus nerve, how to make it work for you rather than against you.
That’s right. Okay. No more anxiety.
No more anxiety, right.
Well, everyone that’s listening, please share the show with your friends and family. People need to understand how this nerve works throughout your body, especially if people are grieving. I think they’ll probably want to be in touch with Karen and let her assist you through that grieving process by maybe helping you understand the vagus nerve and how to utilize it to the best of your ability. And thanks again for being on the show, Karen. And we’ll see you again in a few more months. And everybody, please go out there and make this your best life. And we’ll see you next week.
