For Professionals

Most professional training
didn't cover this.

Spiritual awakenings and near-death experiences are more common in clinical and research populations than most training programs acknowledge. This site was built to be useful to the professionals encountering them — whether in a therapy room, a research lab, or a classroom.

The gap

A significant phenomenon, largely unprepared for

30–40%
of adults report at least one profound non-ordinary experience in their lifetime — making this one of the more common significant life events a clinician's clients may have had.
Rarely disclosed
The vast majority never tell a mental health professional about these experiences — fearing dismissal, pathologizing, or simply having no language to describe what happened.
accounts
studied here — one of the larger cross-validated collections of first-hand spiritual awakening and NDE accounts available for professional reference and research.

The clinical and research infrastructure for spiritually transformative experiences is still being built. The DSM includes V62.89 (Religious or Spiritual Problem) but it's substantially underutilized. The literature is growing but fragmented. And most graduate training in psychology and psychiatry gives these experiences little to no attention — despite their frequency and the significant impact they have on the people who have them.

The result is a professional gap that shows up concretely: clients who can't find language for what happened, clinicians who aren't sure how to respond, and researchers working with small samples because large first-hand datasets are hard to come by. This site doesn't close that gap, but it's a contribution to the growing body of work that is.

What this offers

Depending on your role

For Clinicians
A picture of what clients may be navigating

The accounts in this corpus span the full range of spiritually transformative experience — from gradual awakenings through years of practice, to sudden and unexpected shifts with no prior context. The data gives clinicians a detailed picture of what clients describe, in their own words, across experience types, physical changes, and integration challenges.

  • The 17 most common categories of experience — with the language clients typically use
  • Physical phenomena reported across hundreds of accounts (energy, sleep, spontaneous release)
  • Integration challenges — what makes life harder after an awakening, and for how long
  • Clinical frameworks for differential assessment, including STE vs. psychosis
  • Referral resources and professional networks specializing in this population
For Researchers
A documented, cross-validated dataset

The corpus was built with research utility in mind: consistent tagging schema applied across all accounts, two-model cross-validation with adjudication for disagreements, and public documentation of every methodological decision. The broad/strict dual standard makes the interpretive uncertainty explicit rather than hiding it in a single point estimate.

  • Full methodology: source selection, filtering, AI analysis pipeline, validation approach
  • Prevalence data across 17 experience types, triggers, physical phenomena, and integration challenges
  • NDE sub-corpus analysis — triggers, characteristics, and comparison to non-NDE accounts
  • Honest accounting of limitations: sample bias, language constraints, AI error rates
  • A replicable framework for systematic analysis of qualitative first-hand accounts
Mental health professionals
For Clinicians
Clinical orientation for therapists, psychiatrists, and counselors — what STEs are, how to recognize them, how to differentiate from pathology, and how to support integration.
For Clinicians →
Academics & researchers
For Researchers
Methodology, data access, and corpus documentation for researchers studying spiritually transformative experiences — including full transparency on AI analysis methods and known limitations.
For Researchers →

The independent researcher behind this site — Andy Johns — is available for conversation with clinicians and researchers who want to discuss the corpus, the methodology, or the broader landscape of professional work in this area. If you're building something in this space, or working with a population where these experiences are showing up, he'd be glad to hear from you.

Get in touch →