Episode 44: Echo Bodine on Life After Death: Healing, Heaven, and the Afterlife

Host Jay DePaolo talks with psychic healer Echo Bodine about her book How to Live a Happily Ever Afterlife. Echo shares stories from decades of spiritual work, explores what really happens after death, and offers comforting insights on heaven, healing, and letting go of fear.

 

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Podcast Transcript:

Hello everyone. My name is Jay DePaolo. I'm the owner of Choices Books and Gifts in New York City, a store dedicated to health, wellness, and recovery. It's been helping the community for over 30 years. I am the host of this podcast. You Always Have Choices, where we dive deep into stories of transformation, healing, and personal growth. I'm really happy to welcome you. Today’s guest is Echo Bodine. She's a psychic healer and a teacher, and I'm going to read a little bit about her. So you guys know who we're talking to today.

Okay. All right. Echo Bodine discovered her psychic abilities and gift of healing at 17, including her ability to communicate with Claire. And after two years of psychic training and over a decade of practice with friends and family, she began her full-time work as a psychic healer, ghostbuster, and teacher in 1979. She has appeared on numerous national television and radio programs, including the Today Show, Sightings Beyond with James Van Praagh, and Coast to Coast, and was featured as part of the World's Most Psychic Family. Since 1981, Echo has taught psychic development, spiritual healing, ghost busting, and intuition classes through her center for Intuitive Living as well as online. She has hosted TV and radio shows, co-hosted the Intuitive Living podcast for a decade, and continues to teach and share her expertise worldwide.

That's quite the resume. How are you today? Are you well? Now, I understand why I'm so tired after listening to that. Holy smokes. I'm good, Jay. I'm good. That's good. Right. That's so, so good. So, what we do here on the Choices podcast is dive deep into Echoes. We have a wonderful book that she's going to be talking to us about, and we'll ask her questions about it.

And if you guys don't like, I'm going to jump right in. All right, and away we go. Question one: What inspired you to write How to Live a Happily Ever After Life? And what message do you hope most people and readers will take away from it? You know, Jay, the thing is, all the years that I have been doing ghost busting, I do it with my brother Michael.

We always ask them why they're there. Why haven't they gone on to the other side, and we pretty much have their answers? That came in six categories. And that's what the book is about, the six reasons why souls won't go on to the other side, because it's like, gosh, if people could deal with this stuff or know the true, true truth about things, then they wouldn't be so fearful.

A lot of people are afraid of the idea of heaven. I just somebody said to me yesterday, Oh, I don't want to know about life after death. It's like, wow, okay, so you're just going to live in fear of life after death. So I don't really understand that. But that's just because, you know, I've been doing this for so long that it just seems natural to me to want to understand.

I understand that, yes. What's next? Where. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So. Okay. That's why I wrote the book, and it's based on those six reasons why. And, it was actually my publisher who said, I can't even remember what my choice of the name of the book was, what my publishers said. Gosh, this sounds more like how to Live Happily Ever After.

And I thought, what a great title. So there you have. There we go. All right. Excellent, excellent. Now, number two, you've had a long career as a psychic and a spiritual teacher. How did your personal journey shape the themes in this book? You know, really, it was just communicating with all of these souls who were just so stuck in, that's really.

That's where all my material came from for the book. Oh, it's all your experience at it. Yeah. You said Let me write a book about it. Completely understandable. All right. Yeah. So, number three, many people fear death and the afterlife. You just said that. What common misconceptions do you try to address? Jay, you know what the biggest one is?

People are afraid that if God found them, he would send them to hell. What do you mean, most people think they're bad people? Yeah, that's what people tell me: I've done some pretty bad things in my life, and I don't want to go over there. I don't want God to get his hands on me. That kind of answer. That's what we've heard so many times. And so people are so afraid of hell that they will stay here. Yeah, it's so funny because, you know, I don't know about them, but I have a very forgiving God. Yeah. So we all make mistakes, so? So. All right. And I, I find this exciting and, like you, you know, you want to learn more about it.

Yes. All right. So in your view, what actually happens in the moments right after death? Oh, gosh. See, this is the stuff I love to talk about because, well, you know, it's different. It's different for everybody because some people, their soul leaves the body before they're physically dead, okay? And some souls don't just come out, and they'll just be in the room with the family. Everybody’s watching the body to die, and some of them just shoot straight over to the white light. And I think those are the older souls. They just know where to go. They've been there so many times. So the people who go straight over those are the people we can talk to or know. It's the ones that stick around.

Yeah, we can talk to them. Oh, yeah. Oh, gosh. You'd be surprised how thin. You know, everybody talks about the veil being thin. The veil is thin all the time. So I don't know why people say that, but it's oh, gosh. It's open communication quite a bit. Yeah, yeah. Excellent, excellent. You know, okay. So for some people, like my dad when he died, Jay, it was so fascinating because we were all sitting in the room just waiting, you know, watching his body, and we wouldn't ask the nurse.

Okay. Can we, you know, we've been here all day. Can we go get something to eat? She said, Oh, yeah. He's. Yeah. He's not ready to pass yet. Okay. Went downstairs, came back upstairs. Walked into the room, and something was missing. And I looked at all the machines. No, they were all still going, and I looked over at my sister.

I said, Doesn't seem like something's missing. She said, Yeah, I don't know what it is either. So I opened up psychologically, and there was my dad and my grandma, and she came to give him, and they were going up, and I said, Whoa. I didn't say it out loud. It was telepathy. I said, Whoa, Dad, what's going on?

He said, Strong heart. I'll be dead tomorrow bye. And he went right into the light. So some souls. I had one of my girlfriends who died from colon cancer. Same thing. Her soul came out of her body, and she didn't even die for another day. So. That's so interesting. Wow, yeah, I didn't know that. I thought one went with the other.

Amazingly, one can go first and the other can stay. Yeah. All right. Can you share? And only if you can, share a story from your experiences that gave you the clearest insight into the afterlife.? Okay. It's like a 3 or 4-minute story. Yeah. If it's three minutes, let's try to make it three minutes, and that's good.

Okay, so Sunday morning, I had gone on a ghost busting job the night before with my brother, okay? And we got the ghost onto the other side. Okay. So Sunday morning, I got up, went out of my garden, and I said to God, You know, we send these ghosts to the other side all the time. Can I have information about the other side so that I can tell these folks what they can expect?

And I said, If I'm not ready, please help me get ready. So I said, God, I'm not going to bug you about this, but I'd really like to have some information. Okay, that was on a Sunday. On a Wednesday, the following Wednesday, I had just done a healing on a client. They were walking up the stairs, and Jay, my whole office filled with white light, literally white light. So much so that I couldn't even see my hands in front of me. And then I saw an angel who said, Tell him to get you upstairs. My client. Okay. And then there was this spirit, this female spirit in front of me. And she kept saying, Let's go, let's go, let's go. So I thought, am I dying right now?

What? What is this? And okay, he helped me get up the stairs because my body was really limp. And they said to him through me, Call my brother right away. Tell him to get here immediately. Well, Jay, to try to get Hold of my brother immediately for anything. It's literally impossible. Okay, but they said it, and I thought, okay.

So I went and I sat down, and this woman is still in front of me, spirit saying, Come on, let's go, let's go. I had no idea who this was. I'm not going anywhere with you, lady. I don't know who you are. Honest to God, Jay, my brother walks in the front door and he looks at my client and he says, Three days ago she asked God if she could go to heaven. So they're going to let her go. And right then, Jay, this woman in front of me turned around and looked at me. It was me. It was my soul. Saying, Let's go. And my brother said to Neil, he said, I am supposed to sit here and hold her hand and ground her body while she doesn't go. Yeah.

So just like that, off I went, and, Jay, okay, what did you see there? It was absolutely gorgeous, first of all. Okay. It's like seeing Earth, but in perfect condition. Okay. No, nothing yucky anywhere. It was gorgeous. And this angel said to me, Echo, we have to hurry. This isn't easy on your body. And I later understood that I took all my soul's energy out of the body.

And the soul is like the battery for the body. And so that's why my body was just like a rag doll. And. Okay, so off we go. Over here, there's a building. She says to me. Oh, and our communication was really cool because I would just have a thought. She would immediately answer me in a thought. And so I thought, oh, I wonder what that building is, she said, it's the hospital.

She showed me the second floor of the hospital, and there had to be 100, probably 200. I don't know, that's all. I saw a vent, and on each bed was a caregiver sitting. And I thought, what's up with that? She said this is where suicide souls come, especially the ones that have overdosed. They are brought here, and they are put in a bed. And when they wake up, the caregiver explains to them what has happened. Okay. Because it's been my experience, in seeing a lot of suicidal souls hanging around Earth, that they think this is just a bad dream. They don't think that it actually happened. Okay, so then she showed me the eighth floor, and I saw all these people there, like wheelchairs, canes, glasses, amputees.

And she said, souls don't realize that they are whole. And so this is for the people who need help to get through life. And now we are teaching them. You don't need the glasses. You don't need the cane, you don't need the wheelchair. Your leg is formed. It's still there. It was fascinating. Okay, so then she says, Come on, let's go. And we go and we find a field, and it's like three football fields long, and it's musicians. Honestly, it was fascinating because it's like, if I looked over there, oh, those were opera people and they were singing opera. Okay. Oh, okay. Then I looked over there. Oh, people are singing it. It was like tuning into a radio station.

Okay. And wherever you looked, that was the music that you heard. I mean, if it's fascinating and. Okay. Oh my gosh, we saw villages. She brought me up higher so I could see. And really, you know, like, when we're in an airplane and we can see the boundary. Yes. In the fields. And it was like that, there were different communities and, yeah, but we, we only have so much time.

So that's Wonderful. And then she brought you back. Yes. That was interesting because she had taken me to 3 or 4 other places. Right. And then, Jay, my brother, was saying, sis, this is getting really hard on your body. Your breathing isn't very good. You have to get back here, okay? And I had this thought to myself.

No, I'm not going back. I love it here. I just want to be here. And the angel looked at me, and as I looked over at her, I saw stairs over to the right, and I said, Oh, where do they go? And she said, You can't go there yet. Those are the higher levels of heaven. And just like that, I was back in my body. Wow, I know, and so must have been exhausted.

I was, I was, it took me 20 minutes just to move my legs. I mean, my soul had to just completely go in, then fill up with energy. Right. And, it was. But you know what? You since that experience, I couldn't see the other side so clearly. Now it's Just. Yeah. Yeah. You have a firsthand look. It's a whole different thing.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you asked, and they gave. Yes. How can understanding the afterlife change the way we live our everyday lives? Well, I would say just knowing that, reminding ourselves we're here for a purpose. Earth teaches us a lot of different things. And. Okay, let's get down to business. What do I need to learn, knowing that we're going to go home when it's all done?

So it's gosh, I wish people understood about heaven. It's just so welcoming and loving, and so I think that's it. I mean, you know, I asked the question and I think it's like we can live more comfortably and happier and we don't have to be afraid, right? That oh, God, fear. It's like, you know, I mean, don't get me on a soapbox here about religion, but they're not teaching correctly.

And like, God or heaven or and you know what? You, I've asked, Oh, this was fascinating. Okay. So I've asked many times, what about hell? And then all the angels, all spirits, everybody over there says God would never create a place like that, ever. Okay, but here's what's interesting. When I was on the other side, there was a building, and it didn't have any windows. You didn't really know what it was. It was just this building. And I remember asking the angel, What is that? She said that human beings believe so strongly in hell that they've actually created a place here that looks like hell to them. And so when they go there, okay, so they stand there and they go, okay. Yeah, hell, brimstone, fire everywhere.

Okay. Is there anything else I can do? It's like, just by asking, is there a different way to look at all of this? They come out of that. They gave it to me. Wow, yes. Yes. You talk about unfinished business. How can people address that while they're still here? You know, what is the. The best way is just to think about the relationships in your life and just ask. Okay. Is there any unfinished business here? Because we really don't, you know, Lily. She's the angel who works with me. She says that heaven is full of wounded souls. Okay? And it's because, you know, she is. She shows me a lot of times, a soul, a person with a little red wagon, and they've got all these rocks in their little red wagon, and they take that with them to the other side.

And, she says, clean out your wagon. Don't leave it. Don't bring it with you. Take care of business. Really? And so it isn't just the people that we have currently in our lives. It's people from our past that maybe we hurt or they hurt us, and we're still holding on to this resentment, all that goes with us. And so at some point. But here's the cool thing about going to heaven: when we get to heaven, we can look at relationships and we can see it from a higher perspective, like, oh, I see why I was with that person. Oh, I see why. Oh, I get it. A lot of unanswered questions are answered. Yes. Exactly.

Yeah. It's really cool. For those who have lost someone, how can they feel connected without holding too tightly? Yeah, some people have a loss, and it's devastating. I know. And they hold on tight, and you know, that's hard for the soul because the soul, it's kind of like if you live here in this neighborhood now, you're going to move to a new neighborhood and all of your, you know, your neighbors are here. Oh, come back, come back. They're holding you back, you know, come with us. Be with us. It's like, God, I got to get free from this. So enjoy this. And, so actually, that's a book that I'm working on right now, which is How to Let Go, and just not you, you're going to see that person again. It's all going to work out.

It's just everything is so temporary, and we don't really think of it in those terms. You know, we just don't. We're always so focused on our future, and we're not really living today. So spiritual life. Yes. Yep. What signs or messages should people look for from the other side? And unless they have the gifts you have, do they get things like that?

Yeah. You know, okay, a lot of people think of a red cardinal as a relative that has passed. Okay. Red cardinal seems to be a big sign, but what I have found is that when our loved ones. First of all, when our loved ones come to visit us, we might get a smell. Okay, a smell, and you might turn to somebody else in the room and say, Wow, can you smell that?

Cherry tobacco? No, they don't know what you're talking about. Oh, wow. Okay, that is your loved one. And they're actually thinking. They're thinking of a smell that you will relate to them. That's one of their ways. Okay. Another one is signs like, you know, we'll get off, we'll get over to the other side, and we'll think, cheese.

You know, I'd like to go visit my son today. Gosh, what could I do? Could I do that that nobody else does with him? And we think of these things they do on the other side. And then they try to manipulate things to make it happen. Oh, Jay, this is so cute. I had a lady come for a reading, and she said, I Echo, would you please ask my deceased husband if that's him on the tree outside my window at work, constantly chirping at me and her husband came into the room, and he was laughing, and he said, Yep, that's me.

And he said, You know, I told you I would find you and I wouldn't let you forget me. And she said, Oh my God, he's driving me crazy. And she said, I'm now flying to the point where I'm saying, okay, just go. Just go to the other side. Go on, go have a life. Yeah. So they think, you know, like even with my dad when he comes to visit, I can smell cigarette smoke.

Okay? It's who we think of right away when we get that smell. And that's them there. Yeah. Very interesting, very interesting. Yeah. What are some practical steps listeners can take to prepare themselves spiritually, emotionally, and mentally for the afterlife? Oh, for the afterlife. Oh, wow. Is there a way to prepare, or no, just don't be fearful, is what I'm thinking is warm.

Don't be fearful. And, really, it's okay. Think of it this way, that you've gone off to college for 85 years, okay? And now you get to go back home. If that's as simple as it hits, you get to go back home. And so, that sounds great. Yes. So think of it as, oh, I went off to school to that place called Earth.

Okay. I wanted to learn, you know, what do they call Earth? The emotion planet. A lot of people come here to learn how to have feelings. Yeah. And. Oh, man. And a lot of people try to fight their feelings. And so they're going to come back again and have another opportunity, okay. Because we are whole souls. Our souls are just magnificent. And, but we need to come and have experiences to recognize, oh, that's what love feels like. Oh, that's what joy feels like. Oh, that's what anger feels like. Oh that's what, oh, that's what hatred feels like. Oh okay. Because before we get here, a lot of souls don't know those feelings. So you have all those feelings in heaven as well. Even intensified. Would you say?

Yes? Definitely. Definitely. And so just think of it, okay? You went off to school for so many years, and then you get to go back home. Love it. Love it. Yeah. All right. If you could sum up your biggest lesson about life and death in one sentence, what would it be? And of course, it doesn't have to be one sentence.

Thank goodness. Okay. Interesting. A red cardinal just showed up right outside my window. Really? Yep. Just now. And I never see red cardinals. Isn't that interesting? That is. Yeah. Is it? She's just there. Oh, there she goes. Okay. We have to look at our lives as opportunities. First of all, she goes okay. We have to look at our lives as opportunities, first of all. There are lots and lots of souls on the other side who want a body, who want to come to earth.

They know it's intense down here, but they don't really understand the intensity of Earth until they get here. Okay? And then it's like I asked for this. Are you freaking kidding me? Okay, but enjoy it. It's actually an opportunity for us to grow. So come here. Have your experiences. Don't duck away from. Don't try to get out of them.

Just have your experiences. And then when you're ready, let it all go. Beautiful, let me ask you this. So are there souls that are having trouble getting to the other side that you need to talk through or help with the process? Yeah, that takes us right back to the beginning of the conversation with ghosts. And those ghosts are the souls of people who don't want to go to the other side. Oh, for that focus, the fear, and things of that nature. Yeah. Now, even though they've passed. Yep. Let me tell you something. Okay. Here are some of their six reasons. One is that they don't know they're dead. Now that one, the media seems to use that one a lot.

I think I've only met two souls in 60 years of doing this work. Two souls who didn't know that they were dead. Okay, so they pretend they just hang out in the limbo and pretend that this lady I know, she overdosed on pills. She didn't mean to overdose, but she did. She died. And I looked for her soul when I was at her funeral, and her soul wasn't there. And usually the soul attends its own funeral. So I thought it was really strange that. Where is she? And I saw I opened up psychically, and I saw she was in her kitchen, and she said, Where is everybody? I'm waiting for everyone to come home for dinner. Okay. So she was in denial that she had actually died.

Yeah. Okay. Another thing people don't do they say, Oh, I don't want to run into my ex-husband or my ex-wife. It's like, no way. Heaven is a huge place. So chances of running into them are really slim, and they're still like, no, no, I don't want to take that chance. So then we just tell them, okay, when you get over there, there's going to be greeters.

Just tell them you don't want to run into so-and-so. Okay. Some people don't believe in life after death, and so they die, and their soul comes out of their body. They're like, What is this, right? Why or what am I okay? They do not believe in souls or life after death. So they linger on the Earth plane waiting for someone to explain it to them. But do it. Even when I've gone up to these folks and said, Okay, first of all, why are you here? Well, because I don't believe in this, and I don't know what this is all about. I'm supposed to be dead, and I thought I would no longer exist. Okay. All right. Oh my gosh. And so let's start. Okay, so you're actually a soul.

And yes, there is life after they think they have said to me, Do you work for Satan? Are you trying to collect souls? It's like, where do you even come up with this stuff? Yeah, yeah. Okay. But the people have very varied beliefs about death. Okay. And then the biggest one, like I said, is they're afraid of God. They’re afraid of going to hell. Yeah.

That's so interesting. Yeah, I'm telling you this, this was a lesson for us all. I hope our listeners, you know, go out and purchase the book and stay in touch with you. I know I will. Thank you. You've written a lot of books, so we'll come back and explore some of the others.

Good Jay. All right. So with that, I'm going to say this: we'll wrap up this episode of the Choices podcast. I hope our time together was inspiring and motivating. Stay empowered, stay well. And we certainly hope you got a lot out of our podcast today. You can watch this episode and all episodes on our website at choicesgifts.com.

Peace and blessings, and we'll see you in a week or two. Thank you.