Anita Moorjani - A Journey of Healing, Transformation, and Self-Discovery

Full transcript: Anita Moorjani on London Real

5:51 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Anita Moorjani, who is the author of The New York Times bestselling book Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer to Near Death to True Healing. She has gained international recognition for her work as an author and a speaker. You shared your story on Fox News, National Geographic and CNN.

6:10 You also have a fantastic TED Talk, an inspiration for my TED Talk that’s coming out very soon. Anita, welcome to London Real. Wow, thank you Brian. Thanks for inviting me and I’m really happy to be here. I’m glad you’re here and I think this format is so perfect for you because you have such a fascinating story, such a nuanced story, as well.

6:29 And I think it takes a little time to tell, and I, ’cause I think at first look people assume it’s this or assume it’s that. So I’m glad we have time. I want to get people up to speed really quick and then I’d love it if you could kind of embellish some of those parts of it. But for people that don’t know, I’m going to give you a quick cliff notes. In February 2006 You were on your deathbed, having suffered from cancer for several years.

6:51 You were in a coma with malignant tumors throughout your body. The doctors told your husband, who I just met, and your mother that you had only hours to live after coming out of a 30-hour coma, you emerged from an out-of-body experience with the afterlife, and you gained a new understanding about our physical life. The medical records, which are right here, show that you were found cancer-free within 3 weeks of your near-death experience. That’s an amazing story right there.

7:17 Did I get it right? And can you tell us kind of more about what happened? You absolutely got it right. Yes, that is exactly what happened So on February the 2nd I went into a coma, and the doctors basically said that these were my final hours and my, the tumors I had, some of them were the size of lemons. And they were.

7:43 I had had cancer for four years and it had metastasized. So these tumors were all over my lymphatic system. So from the base of my skull all around my neck, under my arms, my breasts, all the way down to my abdomen. and I had fluid in my lungs. So every time I lay down I would choke on my own fluid.

8:08 I wasn’t absorbing food because, as the cancer spread, I was no longer able to absorb food, so I So I became basically a walking skeleton. My muscles completely deteriorated. I could no longer stand up or walk, so I was in a wheelchair I was breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank, a portable oxygen tank, and I was so weak that I couldn’t even hold my head up, so I would be in a wheelchair and my head would be hanging down. I didn’t even have the strength to hold my head up And I was in a lot of pain.

8:55 I also had these open skin lesions, which were weeping toxins that were coming out of my body And so on February the 2nd, I fell into a coma, and the doctors said that these were my final hours, because now my organs had shut down. And my family, my brother, and my, sorry, my husband and my mother were obviously very distressed, but as I was in the coma, what was unbeknownst to all of them, my eyes were closed, and I was completely in this coma, but I was aware of everything that was going on around me. I could hear and see and feel everything that was happening.

9:42 I could feel everything the doctors were doing. They were poking needles into me and putting in IV tubes and things like that, and my husband was by my bedside holding my hand. I could, and not only could I hear what they were saying. It was like I could feel what they were feeling. Like I was completely empathic to what they were feeling.

10:08 And I could see and hear things that were beyond the room that my physical body was in. And I realized that I could even see my physical body. It was like I felt that I had become separate from my body, and it felt incredible. It felt just absolutely amazing. It was, for me, like the first time in years that I felt so amazing and so pain-free.

10:39 The pain was gone, and I felt light, and I felt like I was really free and expanded, and I also felt something which I can only describe as a feeling of unconditional love. And I know the word love has been overused, but it’s the only word I can think of to describe what I was feeling, because It was just, it was like a euphoric kind of feeling. Like I felt like I suddenly realized that I don’t have to do anything to prove myself I don’t have to do anything to feel that I deserve to be loved.

11:27 I was loved just because I existed. And I don’t remember ever feeling that way before in my life. And now I was no longer attached to my body, and here I was feeling this really incredible feeling of just like I that I had a purpose, that I was loved. and I was worthy. That’s what I felt.

11:53 And then I was also aware that my brother, who was, this was happening to me in a hospital in Hong Kong, by the way. And I was aware that my brother, who was in India was rushing to get on a flight to get to Hong Kong to see me before I died. And so in that awareness I felt I needed to stay alive, at least until he got to me, because I knew that if I died before he got to me, he would be completely distraught and broken, so I knew that I had to stay alive, at least until he got to me, at least until he had a chance to say goodbye.

12:36 Do you ever wonder why that experience happened to you at that moment? Because you know, in another scenario you might have died. And that did. Do you ever wonder why that happened, or do you not look that deep into it? Oh, I do.

12:52 And you know, because as I went deeper into the experience I reached a point where I had the choice of whether to come back or not, because I reached a point where I encountered my deceased father. My father had died 10 years prior. And I felt that he was there to greet me. And he wanted me to know that it wasn’t my time, but even though it wasn’t my time to die I still felt I had the choice. I could still choose to die if I wanted to.

13:29 And was that a tough choice at that time? It was, you know, Actually, I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to come back, so in that sense it wasn’t a tough choice, in that being in that realm was so much better than being here, simply because I felt so incredible and here I had the sick and dying body, and I didn’t want it. So I couldn’t see any good reason to come back into this body, because I was suffering, my family was suffering. So I really wanted to stay there, but in that time I also experienced an incredible level of clarity.

14:12 It was like I understood, I just completely understood how it was that I came to be at that point. in that hospital bed, in that moment, lying there dying from end-stage cancer, I actually understood how every choice and every decision that I had made in my life, in every moment in time, had led me to that point, and I could see it. And in that awakening, I felt as though my father said to me, now that you know this truth, you need to go back and live fearlessly.”

14:55 And I understood that now that I understood this, if I went back, my body would heal. That’s incredible, and it’s incredible to be here to listen to you say that, because you know, it’s very congruent with who you are. I believe everything you just said, because it seems like you, you know, you actually experienced that. Had you ever had any type of, you know, out-of-body experience or any spiritual experiences like that until that point? Not anything like an out-of-body experience.

15:29 I hadn’t experienced it until that point. I mean, I was, I mean, I would say I was someone who did have some spiritual practices in that You know, my parents are Hindu, and I grew up believing in a lot of things, like Karma and and so on. So I tried to follow certain spiritual practices but I think I was a little more dogmatic in that. I was following it for the sake of trying to be a good spiritual person, trying to follow my Hindu religion. But after that experience, after actually dying and coming back, I don’t follow dogma or any kind of religion or spirituality, because it’s like now I know that I’m a spiritual being.

16:20 We all are, every single one of us. We are we don’t have to work at it. I don’t have to keep working at it or trying to be more spiritual. I already am. There’s nothing to work at.

16:31 We all are. So that’s completely changed for me. I want to get your thoughts after what happened and after you digested everything that happened, because I’m sure recovering was a whole other adventure in your mind. But what happened after that experience? Do you?

16:48 Was it everything you just said, and then you kind of came back into consciousness? You know, what actually happened is that in that moment, that my father said, now that you understand the truth, go back and live your life fearlessly. It was, I would say, in that moment that my eyes actually opened. I mean, so much happened. I was in a coma for about 34 hours, but so much happened in that time, because time is not linear there.

17:18 It’s like everything was happening simultaneously. And wherever I put my awareness, there I was. So it was all happening at once, and I felt that it completely changed me. I absorbed so much. It’s like it’s not like going on a course and learning something.

17:39 It’s almost like walking into a room or a situation of something that you’ve never seen before, and finding out the truth about something you can never imagine. You can’t unknow it. You can’t go back and undo it. And it always stays with you, and so it has actually changed my life. It’s changed who I’ve become from that point on.

18:04 You know, about four years ago I was trained, you know, as an engineer, and I got a degree at MIT, and I was always very scientific. And so, but when I started this show, I started to open my mind a bit, and we had some experiences early on. One of them was with the plant medicine iasa, and so when you’re talking about this stuff I remember being in similar states, as in a place where your awareness was complete, where all these things were aware you, all of a sudden, everything makes sense, and things like that.

18:31 So it makes me understand what you’re saying. I’m not comparing the two. I’m just saying I do understand what you’re saying, and I know that that happens, and time is not linear in these places. So you decided to come back? Yes, I did.

18:45 And you didn’t want to come back necessarily right away, until your father told you that. Yes, at first I didn’t want to come back, but my father also said to me that that I have these gifts waiting for me, and What he meant? Okay. So the way we communicate as well is not through language, the way I’m communicating with you right now. So like here we use words, we string them together in linear time, in linear sentences, but in that realm it felt like, because we don’t have our bodies, we don’t have vocal cords.

19:20 It was like my father’s essence and mine. It just, we just merged. So I knew exactly what he wanted me to know. And so I put words to it, but it was like I just completely understood what he wanted me to know. And he wanted me to know that I had suffered up until this point, and even though I didn’t have to go back to my body.

19:47 If I chose not to go back, I would be missing out on the gifts that were now waiting for me. So I understood that now, if I go back, I won’t be living a life of suffering anymore, because of what I now knew. That’s a powerful message. Again, if you’ve grown up in a world of language which is where we live. It’s such a limited way of communicating.

20:12 And yet if you’ve had a spiritual experience like this, sometimes, you know, people come back from these experiences and they can’t even explain them to people, because words are like one tenth of the way of trying to communicate what happened. You don’t even. And maybe you haven’t absorbed it, and maybe it’s come from so many dimensions. So again, I do understand what you mean. I’m so glad, actually.

20:31 Thank you. So you then come out of the coma? Is that kind of what happened next? Yes. So I started to open my eyes, and of course my family, who were right around me, my husband was sitting there holding my hand.

20:45 My brother had just arrived from the airport. My mom was there, and of course they were thrilled that I was opening my eyes, but I was still, of course, very, very weak with all these tubes, and I weighed about 85 lbs, and these open skin lesions, and you know So I was. Do you have any pictures of that we can show? I do, actually. No, let me tell you And when I was in that stage, lying in the bed with the tubes, I refused to have any pictures taken of me, but there are pictures taken of me very close to that stage, which I can actually show you off the internet.

21:18 But yeah, so there are pictures of that which I can absolutely show you. So I started to open my eyes, and my family were thrilled, and then they called the doctor. And I greeted the doctor by name. I said, you know, good afternoon, Dr. Chan, and he was surprised I knew his name, because he only started attending to me after I went into the coma. So he said, how did you know my name?

21:50 And I was surprised he asked that question. Because, to me, it just kind of seemed normal. I just said, aren’t you the doctor that came in this morning and I told him the procedure of exactly what he’d done. I had been choking, and he had stuck a needle in my back and removed fluid from my lungs. And so I said, aren’t you the doctor that came in at about 4:00 or 5 this morning and removed fluid from my lungs?

22:18 And he said, but you were in a coma when I did that. How do you even know I did that? And that’s when it started to transpire with everyone that something had happened. And when he left the room, I said to my husband, isn’t he the doctor that said to you that I won’t even make it through the night, that these are my final hours and my organs have shut down? And my husband, Danny, said, how did you hear that?

22:44 He didn’t even say that in this room. He said it down the corridor. And so it slowly started to come out that something had happened. The doctor, though, he told my family not to raise their hopes. He said, look, she may have woken up from the coma, but she is still very, very weak.

23:04 She’s still very, very sick, and her body is full of cancer and tumors. And so, don’t raise your hopes, because even if she survives, there’s a long journey ahead. But my family were kind of still optimistic, and then I started to tell my mom that, Mom, I saw Dad, and Dad said it’s not my time. I’m going to be okay. I know I’m going to be okay.

23:30 What shocked the doctors was that within four days the tumor shrunk by 7%, and then within three weeks they couldn’t find any trace of cancer in my body. Were they all visiting you in the hospital? Were they all like, what’s going on here? They couldn’t figure out what was going on. My, the main oncologist who was actually treating me He didn’t even know what to write in my medical report.

23:58 He actually made the gesture after the test results came back. He made the gesture of throwing my medical file into the wastepaper basket. He just kind of did that, as a half joke. He goes, I don’t know what to write in here. I don’t know what to make of you.

24:16 I’m just going to throw this in the bin. And you know, he just, he was like scratching his head. He didn’t know what to make of it or what to write. And then he called in another oncologist who said, cancer doesn’t just disappear like that. We just have to find it.

24:33 Let’s do some more tests. So they kept doing these tests, and they couldn’t find anything. So they just focused on getting me stronger, because I was still weak, and in five weeks I was released to go home from hospital. How do you explain this? You must, as sometimes, look in the mirror or after that, when you were at home.

24:54 I mean, did you ever struggle with how that happened, or for you, is it simple? You know, it’s changed the way I think. And because of the way I now think, it is simple. Can you explain that? I feel, I know, not even, yeah, I feel and I know that our physical world, our physical bodies, are a manifestation of our internal self, our internal state.

25:29 We believe that the physical world is the real world. And we let our physical world rule us, and then let our emotions react to the physical. What I realized is it’s the other way around. It’s completely the other way around. When we go inward and realize that that’s where our power is, that we are actually incredible, powerful, magnificent, magical, beautiful beings.

26:03 When we realize it, when we know it, when we become it, our bodies and our lives reflect that. That’s what I learned. That’s fascinating. And you believe that the cancer was a product of fear that you had picked up all throughout your life, and anxieties about yourself, and if I understood your book correctly, is that what you believe, that was the manifestation of all of those emotions throughout your life? For me it was.

26:30 And so I want to clarify here, is that I believe that I had spent a lifetime of making all my choices, every choice, every decision, from a place of fear. See, I believe that we are driven only by two forces and let’s label them love and fear. So, two opposing forces. And these two forces are what drives every decision we make in life. And so you can give it different names.

27:02 You can change the love, for joy or passion or whatever but it’s pretty much the same. It’s one is a positive energy and one’s a negative energy. So in other words, when you do anything in life, like if you choose a job, are you choosing it because it brings you joy? Do you follow your passion by choosing it, or are you choosing it because you fear that if you don’t take it, you won’t have enough money? You’re doing it because you fear not being able to pay the bills.

27:33 Sometimes even when people get married, you know, we get married. Is it because this person brings us joy, because we love them, or is it because we fear being left on the shelf and our body clock is getting older, and so on, and that’s why we’ve finally decided to say yes and get married. These are basically the two forces that drive us in making all our decisions. So when I was in that realm, looking down at my body, I mean, I felt incredible. My body looked small and weak in comparison to what I was feeling.

28:11 And I realized that every decision that I had made up to that point was made from a place of fear. And living that life of making every decision from that place had made me really small. It had made me, I was fearful of displeasing other people. So basically when we do things are we doing it because we want to do it, or because we’re afraid that we’re going to displease other people if we don’t do it? So I was a people pleaser.

28:44 I treated myself like a doormat. I was working in a job that I didn’t like, and so on, so every decision had been made from a place of fear, until I was so small and repressed that, to me, it felt like the cancer in my body was like my own energy turned inwards towards me. Somebody more scientific or medical-based might say it’s because I had depleted myself so much that my immune system was so weakened that I was open to disease. What do you say to the scientists that say this is a biological, you know, biological issue.

29:27 This is a cancer. This happens ’cause this cell does this, and it has nothing to do with our brains. What do you say to people that tell you that? I’m sure all the time Yeah, I say that’s fine, you know, if you need to explain it that way. Because I don’t feel the need to convince anyone of anything, simply because nobody can explain it, like the biologists, the scientists.

29:52 None of them can explain how the cancer disappeared. So I leave them to figure it out in their own words, because they don’t have the answers. Right, right. Not one of them. An oncologist flew to Hong Kong from the US after he discovered my case.

30:09 He flew to Hong Kong. He asked me to take him to the hospital where it happened. I took him there. He went through my medical records, and he said, whichever way I look at it, you should be dead. And he wrote a testimonial for my book, and he actually said that I should write a book.

30:29 He encouraged me to write a book. But he went and then sent my medical reports to five different cancer institutes around the world, and each one said nobody has come back. They have no record of anyone who has come back from such a late stage of cancer and done it so quickly. Because what they said is, where did the cancer cells go? You have billions of cancer cells throughout your lymphatic system.

31:01 What they said is that one thing is that if you have a spontaneous remission, what it means is your body, somehow, something triggers a switch so that you stop producing cancer cells. But even then it takes months for you to heal, and for those cancer cells to actually leave your body and for you to get stronger. So what they said was, your organs were shut down, and yet all those cancer cells left your body in less than three weeks. So where did they go?

31:33 So where did they go? They can’t. So you turn it around on the scientific people and say, okay, if your science is so good, explain this. Yeah, so I tell them, you tell me. When they ask me, right?

31:44 So exactly, in answer to your question, when they ask me I tell them, this is what happened. You tell me, if you want, in scientific terms. Right, exactly. And I read that It’s kind of midway through your book, where that doctor just breaks. He looked through your case, and he just said yeah, you know, you should be dead right now.

31:59 By the way, we are giving away copies of the book to the best quote that you’ve heard Anita say so far during the episode. If you tweet that out and put at londonreal.tv, we’re sending out 10 copies of this book to you in the UK or the US. I want to ask you, what happens after this experience? Because you know, you’re released from hospital, all of a sudden this life is back to you. You know, there are countless stories of people coming out of prison and they don’t know how to deal.

32:23 Now you’re healthy and you don’t know how to deal. So many times people come back from Afghanistan you know, with missing two legs, and they don’t know how to deal with these new situations that are supposedly much better. Did you have a kind of a tough time getting back to reality at first? Huge. Okay.

32:38 Huge. Because my experience just changed me. It changed the way I view illness. I don’t see illness the same way I used to. I don’t see life the same way I used to.

32:50 I’m not afraid of death. You’re not afraid of death? Explain that. I’m not afraid of death. I love my life, mind you.

32:57 I’m not in a hurry to go. I’m not in a hurry to die. I absolutely love my life. I’m incredibly happy doing what I do. I would not change what’s happened to me for anything.

33:10 But at the same time, I know death is beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s nothing to be afraid of. So that’s so counterintuitive to our Western minds, that death could be beautiful because, you know, Western religions, you know, death is the devil. Death is the bad death.

33:28 You know, these things, bad things happen, you know, to bad people, etc. But you say death can be beautiful? Oh yes, it’s absolutely beautiful, because you’ve seen it. No, why is it beautiful? Can you explain that?

33:38 Everything becomes known. It’s like we become transparent, and it’s, there’s a likeness in death. And yet I’m going to say that death is a state that we can have in life, because death taught me how to live. And I feel sad that people only find this out at the end of their life, and this is why I share my story. I share my story because I want you to know You know, we don’t value what we have until we lose it, and that’s a sad fact of life.

34:13 I didn’t value my life until I nearly lost it, and I’m sure there are many people out there who don’t value their lives, because if you valued your life you would not spend day in and day out doing something you hated. You absolutely would not, if you valued your life. And so death taught me how to live, and that’s why I say death is beautiful. It was an absolute gift for me to have the experience to die. This acronym NDE.

34:40 I wasn’t familiar with it, now I am familiar with this, which is near-death experience, which is a crucial part of your story. One that I don’t think I articulated or understood well enough in our, my, previous short videos about you, because this is an important part of, and there’s a lot of people that have had these NDEs. I guess, it does give you a huge appreciation of your life, and it’s an important part of your story, not just the recovery part is that correct?

35:03 Yes, yes. It’s actually the experience of the death. The near-death experience itself is what has given me insights into life, or that’s what’s given me the gift of of knowing how to live my life. Absolutely, because I now know, you know, because I used to spend my life trying to create the perfect afterlife. My spiritual practice was about.

35:36 I used to study a lot of spirituality, and my spiritual practice was about how to create good karma in the afterlife. Or if I was of a different religion, I would interpret that as, to make sure I get to heaven, for example, you know, to make sure I attain Nirvana. And so I would spend my life with the intention of creating the perfect afterlife so that I don’t get judged, I don’t get bad karma, I don’t go to hell, and so on. I realized from death that actually my purpose here is to immerse myself in life fully not to spend it thinking about creating the perfect afterlife.

36:20 I’m here for a reason, and I’m here to be who I am. I’m a facet of this universe. I’m an aspect, and I am the way I am for a reason. My purpose is to be as me as I can be. So then, is religion bad?

36:39 No, it’s not bad. I just think it’s been misinterpreted because today religion seems to separate us, whereas if you look at the at the actual prophets of these religions, whether it’s Jesus or Buddha or Krishna or Allah or Yahweh, doesn’t matter who all their philosophies are quite similar, and I don’t believe any of them intended to start a religion. So the people, the prophets, whose religions we follow They’re, what they preach, is probably very, very close to the truth, if not the truth itself.

37:18 The problem is in the followers. Yeah, and then it becomes a power issue. You know, I think, you know it’s interesting that when people hear your story, and we’ve got the medical records, and people want to talk about your cancer and if it happened or didn’t happen. But for me, I think they kind of missed the point, because regardless, you now have this new way of looking at life and this new perspective, and that’s what I want to hear more about, because the circumstances of that aren’t as important.

37:46 I mean, you know, Muhammad went out into the desert and he came back with all these fantastic ideas. You know, Jesus was maybe the Son of God, I don’t know, but he had all these wonderful, inspiring ideas. So part of me thinks that it misses the point when people focus on your cancer. Do you feel that way? I feel that way.

38:02 And when people also focus on the medical records, which I have, you know, but if people need to only focus on that then I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to convince them, because I feel that if they’ve already made up their mind that what I’m saying is not true, or it’s a delusion of my mind, I’m okay with it, because I am incredibly happy, and if you call me delusional, that’s fine. Last time someone called me delusional, I almost fell off my unicorn. What does that mean?

38:45 I am delusional. I am delusional. But see, my response, I guess, to somebody who challenges me or who debunks me would be to say that I’m not here to try and convince you of anything. I have no agenda. I’m not selling you anything.

39:04 My message is available all over the internet for free. I’ve conducted so many interviews, created so many YouTube videos, the story is on my website. My message is for free. You don’t have to buy my book. You don’t have to come to any of my seminars.

39:20 The message is there for free. You don’t have to believe me, but all I’m saying to you is that how is your life working out for you? Because I love my life. I love where I am. I love what I’m doing, and I didn’t before this experience.

39:38 When you went home from the hospital that day, did you get home and you’re like, okay, time to be the messenger, time to get my book ready and get the videos shooting? None of the above. So none of the above. What was, I had no idea this is where I’d be. What was your journey back to life?

39:55 Oh my God, go. Okay, the day I left the hospital I was very sad, ’cause that had been my home for the last five weeks. I had become very attached to the nurses there. They were wonderful. You know, the care that they were giving me.

40:12 And so I was actually very sad, and actually a little bit scared, and my husband and my brother and my mom, they all took me in a wheelchair into the car to drive me home. And it felt really strange to be out in the world. because it was the first time I was going out into the world, and the world looked different. It looked brighter and more colorful. It looked very, very different as I looked out the car window.

40:41 And as we drove home I thought, wow, this just looks incredible. It looked very beautiful and new and surreal, and also what was different was that I felt different. I felt that I could feel what people were feeling, and this feeling stayed with me for many, many months, where I felt I could tell what they were feeling, even though they weren’t saying what they were feeling. You know, so for example, the reason for language and communication is to express our feelings so people can understand us better.

41:22 But I started to realize, for some reason, I could actually see that what people were saying and what they were feeling were two different things. that we actually use language to disguise what we’re feeling, not to express what we’re feeling. And I could feel when people were fearful, and it was like the near-death experience had just stripped away all the layers of filters and beliefs, and all the layers and layers of protection that we put around us through our life, and so suddenly I felt very transparent, and so I could just feel what everybody was feeling.

42:12 It was almost like a sixth sense. Yes, a very strong sixth sense. Okay, and so you started to notice these things, and you noticed all these incongruencies yes, that you didn’t notice before. I didn’t notice before because I was incongruent too, right? And I wasn’t able to go back to being that old person again.

42:30 And at the same time, I found it really hard to integrate I couldn’t go back to finding a job. I just couldn’t see myself going back to work and spending days in, you know, in an organization. I just couldn’t do that. So at first I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with myself. And here’s the other thing, that my husband had been taking care of me all these months.

42:57 He’d stopped going to work, so he got fired from his job because he was just not showing up, because he thought I was dying. So he had stayed home with me. He had stayed in the hospital with me, so he’d lost his job, and then there was me and there was him. We had no work. We had no job.

43:14 We had to move house because we were staying in a pretty, really nice rented apartment, which we couldn’t pay for anymore, so we had to move out to a smaller place. And none of it mattered. The material part of it just stopped mattering. I was so in this space where I just wanted to rediscover who I was, and I just wanted to know, who am I? Why am I here?

43:47 Why did I come back? There were moments where I questioned, should I have stayed there? And I didn’t know why, but I kept remembering that my only purpose is to be who I am. In other words, be authentic. Stop going into that blindness again.

44:10 Where, what I say and what I do, or what I feel and what I say, are two different things. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to go back into that old pattern anymore. Not only did I not want to, I couldn’t go back to that. It didn’t feel right.

44:26 It didn’t fit anymore. And so I realized that all I had to do was just to be myself, just to be authentic, and it was my husband who suggested to me. He just said, why don’t you just start writing about everything you’re feeling? I was never a writer before. I was never a writer.

44:47 I was never a speaker. I was, you know, I was just somebody who worked in a corporate office. So I just started writing and writing and writing. And then my brother sent me a link to an NDE website, and so he said, hey, why don’t you submit your story here? So I submitted it to them But I didn’t even give them my full name.

45:10 I didn’t want people to know it was me. And I didn’t want any recognition for it or anything. And so I sent it in, and the guy who owned the site happened to be an oncologist. His name is Dr Jeffrey Long. So he started asking me some questions about the actual cancer part of it and everything.

45:32 And he was wonderful, because he completely believed me, because he had the site was his, and he had spoken to many people who had had near-death experiences. So he put my story on the homepage of his website. And then it went viral, and that’s how this other oncologist picked up on it, and finally Wayne Dyer picked up on it. And then Wayne Dyer contacted his publishers and told his publishers, hey, house, track me down See, my name wasn’t even on that vlog, but through some clues that I’d written that I lived in Hong Kong, they tracked me down and they offered me a book contract.

46:10 Okay, and this was four years ago, five years ago. The book contract came in 2011. Okay, and you had been writing and being a little more comfortable talking about your show story before that I had been writing and writing, and so it was all writing. The first time I spoke in front of a real audience was in 2011. Then Wayne flew me over to to California.

46:35 First it was Australia. Second, he had me speak in front of 3,000 people, and I was really nervous. how, I mean, you don’t seem nervous now. You seem to have, you know, found a great way of articulating your message, which I know takes time. Again, language sometimes can be a very difficult thing to work with when it comes to unting feelings.

46:56 But how did you end up occupying this role of speaking to 3,000 people, and how’s that part of your journey gone? Oh, it’s actually been quite incredible. I was not a speaker. I have never been a public speaker. But when Wayne pulled me up on stage in front of 3,000 people.

47:17 I was really nervous. I think I was quivering, my voice was quivering, and then he, so he actually said to me, how are you feeling? So I said, I’m really scared. I’m nervous. And he said, what have you got to be nervous about?

47:30 You’ve been dead and back. What’s worse than that? And yeah, I think he said something like, people only fear two things, public speaking and death, so you’ve conquered both now. And what are some of the things that you talk about, and what are some of the themes that you go through? I know one of them is the importance of loving yourself unconditionally.

47:51 You kind of talked about that, but if you have to break down your ideas, what are some of them? Okay. The first and foremost is, absolutely, I tell people to love themselves unconditionally. Because unless you love yourself, you cannot be self-aware. You cannot Because if you hate or loathe yourself, if you’re constantly criticizing yourself, there’s no way that you can be self-aware in a way that you can offer the same to other people.

48:21 Interesting. I never thought of it that way. So you have to have some love for yourself before you can even be aware of yourself. Exactly. Okay, let me put it another way.

48:28 For example, if somebody is really, really happy and fulfilled within themselves, and they’re sitting in a room with you, you can usually feel it. You feel uplifted just by being with them. They don’t have to tell you specifically or give you any advice specifically, but just their demeanor, the way they are, their smile, their eyes when they’re talking. You like just being in their presence don’t you? Oh yeah.

48:56 And if some, exactly. And if somebody is depressed, unhappy, hates their job thinks life is boring, and if you’re in a room with them, what does it feel like? Not great. The person who is happy and self-fulfilled, that person, in order to get to that place has to love themselves enough to do that for themselves. The other person is depressed.

49:23 Now we go around believing Now this is another incongruency. I’m talking about, the world feels completely upside down and back to front since I’ve had this experience, we believe that it’s selfish to love ourselves. Yet we believe that we’re supposed to go and make other people happy. How do you make someone happy if you’re depressed? You’re very energy.

49:46 You bring yourself wherever you go. If you are happy self-fulfilled, self-aware, and living an amazing life, you take yourself wherever you go. So you are taking this happy, amazing person into a room with other people, and without even saying anything, you’re uplifting them. Well, the other person who believes that, oh, it’s selfish to love myself and so they’re always criticizing themselves, and I have to always do things for other people. You’re bringing that person to the other people, and you’re bringing them down before you’ve even done anything for them.

50:27 Does that make sense? Yeah, that to makes total sense, because so many of us don’t love ourselves, and I think it’s the way, and then that makes us treat ourselves poorly. And so if you look at someone who’s got a bad diet or a bad self- dialogue. I mean, it’s ultimately because they don’t value themselves. Exactly.

50:42 And it comes out in everything, their energy, their posture, their lifestyle, everything. I mean, even our financial condition in many cases, it’s because we don’t feel worthy. We don’t feel worthy of making or earning money, for example, and people who are struggling, really, really struggling, one of the first things I tell them is that the only thing you need to work on is in feeling that you are worthy and deserving of something better than what you have now.

51:13 It’s not about constantly going out and chasing and pursuing that next job, that next level, more money, or the fame, or whatever. It’s not about pursuing it, because if, in turn, you don’t feel worthy, you don’t feel deserving of it, no matter how much you chase, you won’t be able to hang on to it. Right? And you’ll sabotage yourself along the way. Exactly, because you don’t believe you are.

51:35 At the same time, in this crazy kind of Western world, we have this self-dialogue with ourselves that tells us when we don’t have money, then we’re not successful and we’re no good, and we’re kind of judging ourselves in that way, which is really counterproductive. And for some people, like having a million dollars in the bank, is success and for some people it means they’re dirt poor, you know, depending on where they are. And so what does that really mean?

51:56 It doesn’t necessarily even mean anything. It’s really more about your attitude, you know. And exactly. And I mean, it’s funny, we had a blog post on our site recently. It’s by a guest I had, named Peter Sage, and he had a quote, and it made me think of you, and he said, feeling wealthy is nothing more than the perception of abundance triggered by gratitude, while he said poverty is simply the perception of scarcity triggered by fear and loss.

52:18 These. That’s wise. That’s, that’s so. It sounds like something you’ve seen. Now, once you’ve come through your experience, that you kind of see people doing this to themselves?

52:31 Yes, I see people, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re wealthy or poor. But if their lives are driven by fear, I mean, even wealthy people who have everything they don’t feel the joy of having it, because they’re still driven by fear, and the reason why they’re even accumulating so much is because the fear still keeps them in that place of, I still don’t have enough, I still need to make more to prove to myself that I’m successful. But actually, success comes from inside, not from the outside.

53:03 We tend to give our power away to everything that’s outside, to external perceptions, right? Our bank account balance, our job title, our car. Exactly, when in fact it’s an internal piece. It’s an internal piece, right? And sometimes those internal those external signs are the opposite of what’s happening inside.

53:21 Yep, exactly. How do people take the step to love themselves? I mean it’s an easier thing to do once you do. But when you’re in that cycle, you know, that can lead to, you know, depression, whatever you call depression. That’s probably the wrong word for a lot of different issues.

53:33 But how do people start to love themselves? Okay, I give people a lot of different tips. One of them is that, actually, if I can backtrack a little bit Yes. I want to say that when I was when I was in the hospital, when I was recovering. This is the part where it really hit me, of how much I hadn’t loved myself before, because in that near-death experience state, I realized how amazing I was, and that’s when I started really feeling this incredible love and value for myself.

54:14 I knew that I was worthy and deserving. But when I came out of the coma, about a week after I came out of the coma, I remember a nurse who encouraged me to get out of the bed and start walking and start using my legs again. And so I started walking, and then I told her So she was holding my arm, and I said, could you take me to the washroom? I want to look at myself in the mirror, because I hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. And when she took me to the mirror and I saw myself, and I didn’t recognize the person I saw, because my cheeks were all sunken.

54:58 My eyes looked like they were, like, big and bulging out of their sockets. My hair was all gone And, you know, I weighed about 85 lbs, and I had huge scars all around my neck from the open skin lesions and the tumors and everything, and I looked at myself in the mirror and I just started crying. And I even remember I put my hand to the mirror, to my face, and I was crying, not out of vanity because of the way I looked, but more because I was so sad at what I had allowed to happen to myself.

55:40 And yes, I felt that I had allowed it to happen by being so self-destructive and hateful towards myself, spending a lifetime of hating myself. And I remember in that moment when I looked in the mirror I actually said to myself, how could I let myself do this to me? How could I not know how amazing and incredible and beautiful a person is in there in this body? And then I made a promise that I will never, ever treat myself like a dorat again. I will never let myself down again, and I’ll always, always be my own best friend.

56:26 And so what I tell people today is that loving yourself doesn’t mean just doing things like going for massages, going to the spa, or having your nails done. I mean I have people tell me, oh, I must really love myself because I take time out for myself to do these things. I mean, that’s great, you know. And then, or people say, I do all these things for myself, and, but my life still doesn’t work. It’s great to do these things for yourself.

56:56 Take care of yourself. All of that is fabulous, but loving yourself means really sticking by yourself no matter what. It means even if you fail, even if you fall flat on your face, even if you lose everything, even if everybody else is criticizing you. It’s about promising that you will never do it to you, that you will still stick up for yourself. You will still be able to say, I will stick by me no matter what.

57:29 And get up and move on. That’s a powerful message. And is it simply about telling yourself that message that you just told me over and over again? Will that kind of get you there, or are there other ways that you can begin to love yourself? I can tell you some other ways.

57:48 One way would be every morning you could say something like, what would I do today if I did love myself, and really be honest, just say, if I did love myself, what would I be doing? And see what comes into your head and see how different it is from what you’re actually doing, and that tells you how authentic you are or aren’t. Right? That’s a good story. So if I love myself, I would do something today that would bring me joy and happiness, not do something today for someone else, or that would bring me this, to keep away from my fear.

58:27 And then the other thing you said earlier, which I like, is, are you doing things out of fear or out of love, and really go deep, again, like you said. You might be getting married out of fear. You might be working that job out of fear, somehow. Yes, and it’s shocking how many of our choices are made out of fear. And the reason why so many people have so much trouble in their life is because we make more choices out of fear than love, so we find ourselves in a place in our lives where we don’t want to be, because we haven’t made the choices from a desire of wanting to do these things.

59:07 We’ve made it from a fear of avoiding something else. So we’ve ended up in a place where we don’t want to be. And so we find ourselves living a life that is not one that we want, or one that we thought we would be creating. When you speak, what is the reaction people have to you? And what are those engagements like when you talk to people, and people come up to you afterwards?

59:29 I mean, I’m sure you’re used to it in a way now. But what do people say to you? The people have been amazing. I, I laugh because I love just about everyone I’ve met. I mean even people who challenge me, or who’ve had challenging questions.

1:00:01 They want, even those challenging questions, or somebody who comes across as a skeptic or a debunker I can sense right away it’s coming from their fear, right? It’s coming from their fear of not knowing. So it’s very hard for me to feel offended. All I just, I just love connecting with all the people who I have met in this line of work that I do. I just And I don’t even feel I have a choice in what I’m doing.

1:00:36 I just feel guided. I just feel this is what I’m meant to be doing, and the people have been really amazing. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t for them. But yeah, the people have just been amazing. The reaction has been overwhelming for me.

1:00:54 Some, sometimes, sometimes I have to pinch myself. It’s It’s just incredible. It’s really just incredible, and all and I can’t believe it sometimes, because what I want people to know, the core of my message is that you hold the key to your own power and your own healing. Don’t give that power away. Don’t give it to someone else.

1:01:21 Don’t give it to the pharmacist. Don’t, you know, give it to to medicine. And don’t give it to me, certainly. But you have that power. And I actually expected to have more resistance, to have people push against my message.

1:01:41 But it hasn’t been the case. I’ve been overwhelmed by the number of people that have actually related and said, wow, your story is my story. For so many people, the message becomes about them. Yeah, and I know you’ve said it. I think one of your quotes that you said is that, oh yeah, I’m not asking you to believe in me, I’m asking you to believe in yourself, which pretty much sums up Anita, I would say.

1:02:03 But what do you, I mean, a lot of people, the message does become about them, and it becomes ‘follow me,’ and that’s probably how some of these toxic religions were created. Somehow it becomes about a person or about an institution. I mean, when you see that, do you try to stay away from that? is, I try to tell them that. So when you wait, so just to clarify, make sure I got it right?

1:02:24 When you say it’s like, you mean, it’s when people make it about me, do I try to stay? Sometimes when people have a great message, you know, it kind of by default becomes about them, and then it’s like, Anita says this, and Anita says that. Is that something you try to steer clear of, because so many people out there are the messages about them? Yeah, no, I steer clear of it in that I keep reminding people that you are your own guru, that if you give me your power, you’re just changing like you got into your situation because you gave your power away.

1:03:00 You’re not going to get out of it just by changing who you give your power to. So the message is, so I try and tell them you’ve missed the point. If you give me, if you if you then give me your power, the message is you have to own it. You really have to own it, and one of the problems, one of the reasons why it’s very hard is because our society, our culture globally, I’m talking about everybody’s culture, does not support this kind of thinking. We tend to condition people to believe that they are powerless.

1:03:39 So, and why do we do that? You see, that’s the thing. That’s another upside-down thing. Why is it that we condition people to learn and believe in the opposite of what really works in life? If you ask people what they want in life, nearly everybody wants the same thing.

1:03:59 Who wants war? Nobody. We want peace. Everybody wants to make enough money to be comfortable, so they have enough freedom to follow their passion or their creativity. I mean, just about everybody wants the same thing.

1:04:15 Yet how have we got it so wrong that just about everybody is miserable and has not created what they want? Tell us why. Need a But you’re so right. But tell, but why? Why is that?

1:04:28 Is it a capitalist issue, or is that just glossing over it? I think it’s just more, it’s because of what everybody was doing yesterday. So basically my thinking is that we are born perfect. Because one of the questions I had when I came back is, how come I didn’t know this before? Why was I allowed to go through life without knowing this?

1:04:55 Why was I so miserable if I knew what I know now? I would never have got the cancer, but I’m glad I got it, because, you know, because my, I like the way my life is now, but but I realized that we are actually born perfect. We’re born knowing how amazing and incredible we are. We’re born knowing how powerful we are. We’re born knowing we’re connected, because you see how children and babies they sense everything about their parents, even without language.

1:05:27 They sense their mothers and their mother’s energy. And you see how easily babies laugh, and they’re happy. That we’re born knowing all this. So we spend the first 20 years of our lives getting it conditioned out of us, and then we spend the next 20 years of our life trying to live a life with all this conditioning, this new conditioning, and then by the time we’re 40 we think, oh my God, what have I become? Whose life am I living?

1:05:59 And then we go for all these self-help books and seminars to try and find ourselves again. What I want people to know is that you already are what you were trying to, what you are now trying to attain, you already are. It, you were born with it. You were born perfect. You were born complete.

1:06:18 It’s not that you’re missing anything. It’s just that you’ve now got to just shed all those layers, let go of everything you’ve added on top, so it’s not about trying to go out and be something or learn something or get something. You already are those things. What is next for you? What is your kind of mission now?

1:06:38 Is it to speak? Is it to meet with the most people possible? I mean, and how do you know that from day to day? I follow my guidance. So on the one hand, just to be clear, Sorry, so what I do is I follow my guidance, and I just kind of surrender my life.

1:06:59 I could say to the universe, or to my higher self, to my inner voice. And so on the one hand I say don’t give your power away, and on the other hand I say I surrender myself, and a lot of people feel that’s a contradiction. So that’s why I wanted to bring that up. When I say don’t give your power away, I mean don’t give it away to other people, don’t give it away to the external world, to the physical world. Don’t give it to money.

1:07:32 Don’t give it to medicine don’t give it to people. When I say surrender, I surrender I surrender to something that’s far greater than this physical world. I surrender to nature, to the power of the universe. And that’s always so much bigger. So it’s sort of like going with nature rather than going against nature.

1:08:00 And when I go with the flow of nature, it’s like going with the flow. I get, I go where I need to be, with much less effort, and life just kind of works in an effortless way. It doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen. Of course, there are things that I have to deal with, but they are always things that I’m able to deal with. I can always rise to the occasion, because I’m going with nature.

1:08:29 When I go against nature, when I go against nature, I’m creating problems that go against who I am, and then it gets very stressful. Okay, is that get stressful when you’re speaking, and you’re, you know, in London doing book tours and things like that? I mean, do you have to kind of choose? Okay, I want to do this, I don’t want to do that, ’cause I’m sure people want more of you. Yes.

1:08:53 So I, thankfully, I have people in place to do the vetting. So because, because I’m living in linear time at the moment as opposed to living in all of time happening all at once. So because I’m in linear time, I have somebody who manages my schedule, and her job is to work with people like my publishers and so on to determine which are the which are the most pertinent interviews, or the most meaningful or the ones that would resonate more, or the ones that would reach the biggest audiences.

1:09:29 So in other words, she looks for the best use of my time. So for example, if I say I’m going to be in London for four days or five days, I’ll say, let’s allocate one day for interviews, as many as you can fit in that one day, and then she’ll find the most pertinent ones. So, right, I was just curious. It came to my head, have you had an out-of-body experience since that day on February 2nd or 3rd, 2006? Yes and no.

1:09:57 And I’m going to say yes and no. Because I felt that it took a long time for me to get focused back into my body, because even though I came out of the coma I didn’t feel fully in my body for a long, long time. It took a while to get adjusted. So from that perspective, I kind of felt I had one foot in each side, in each realm for a long, long time. Okay.

1:10:33 Shall we go to a few of the questions on YouTube? All right, absolutely. Here we go. These are some of the questions we got this week, all sorts of different issues, and I’m glad, because some of these are going to address, you know, some of the cancer issues and stuff. What we should talk about also, just if I mentioned it earlier, but we’re giving away 10 copies of Anita’s book.

1:10:49 Tweet out the best quote so far of the episode. My favorite was ‘dying dine is beautiful.’ Is that what you said? Yeah, dine is a beautiful thing. What an amazing concept.

1:10:58 I’m going to go through a few of these, and some of these are cancer related. So I’m going to go through them. One person said, I’d love to know her thoughts on the ethics of promoting alternative, unproven cancer treatments. What if someone who could have been saved by chemotherapy decides to try to cure cancer with their mind instead, and fails? I think the choice should be up to the person who is going through the cancer.

1:11:23 I think that it should be a personal choice. So if somebody has decided to to use chemotherapy, I think everybody should support them in their choice. If somebody has decided to go with more natural natural treatments, I think the people around them should support them. What was happening with me was that whatever choice that I made in terms of treatment there were people who were telling me the opposite, like, oh, you shouldn’t do that. So if I was doing chemotherapy I had people telling me, you’re putting toxins in your body, and that’s not the way to treat cancer.

1:12:05 So I would be really fearful if I chose not to do chemotherapy and just went the natural way. I had people who really believed in conventional medicine telling me, you’re crazy, how can you do that? You should do chemotherapy. So I personally feel that what actually happens, my view now, let me say here, my view of cancer is very, very different now because of what I’ve been through. I feel that whatever is the dominant paradigm has a lot of influence over what heals you and doesn’t.

1:12:41 I feel that if, in your surrounding, the dominant paradigm of your culture believed that certain some other kind of natural therapy was the cure for cancer, you would get cured by that. And so it has a lot to do with it, and because the dominant paradigm I was in believed that chemotherapy was the only cure, whereas I had friends who had done it in the natural way, I was very confused. So my answer would be, as long as the person who was suffering from cancer was supported in their choice, then there’s no ethical or moral dilemma there.

1:13:24 And you went the natural route at first, and then towards the end you did have chemotherapy sessions? Yes. And when I did have the chemotherapy the doctors, when I agreed to have the chemotherapies, the doctors actually said it’s too late you’re so far gone that the chemotherapy may actually kill you. Interesting. So you believe that maybe if you had had it with the right energy or earlier, or done whatever treatment, you used more congruently that is the right thing to do.

1:13:51 The right thing to do is to do it more congruently. So if you are going to do it naturally, make sure you have a strong team of people around you who are going to support you in your choice, and not say to you, you’re making the wrong choice, man, this is going to kill you, you should do this. You need people who believe in what you’re doing, who themselves believe that what you’re doing is the right thing, and you believe that that can manifest itself physically in you.

1:14:21 That helps you a lot. Okay, but I also believe that we’re all going to die one day anyway. We don’t know at what age some people’s lifespans are shorter, some are longer. I do believe that if you know, if cancer is one of the ways of exiting the world when it’s your time, then it is, then there’s nothing you can do about it. Okay.

1:14:49 I know a lot of cancer survivors constantly fear, you know, it coming back, and I was wondering if you felt that fear and what you tell other people? I’m sure you have cancer survivors that come and talk to you and I’ve been told this, just this lingering fear, which I guess, from your point of view, is just going to hurt you more in the long run. Yes, and I’m going to say something really provocative. I hate the word remission, and I wish doctors would remove it from their dialogue.

1:15:20 I hate that word when people tell me that they’re in remission. I tell them to change that word to remember your mission. Use this time to remember my mission, remember why I am here, what is my purpose. Use this time to do that, and tell yourself, I am done with cancer. I am done.

1:15:41 That was who I used to be. I don’t have it anymore. I’m going to spend this time now to create my new life. It’s like putting a time bomb over people’s heads, and it’s not helpful at all. It’s a cancerous word.

1:15:55 It’s a cancerous word, right? And many people say that language is everything, and you know you’re talking about when you had, you know, your near-death experience, how all of these messages were communicated with you not in a lingual way, and yet we have to communicate in this lingual world, and we use these words without thinking about them, and yet these same words are the ones we use to put ourselves down all the time, or to judge, or like you said, a simple word like that just has a way of you framing the world around you as if you’re walking on eggshells. Yes, and you have this five-year time bomb that I’m not clear until it’s, I’m done now.

1:16:32 When I healed from cancer, actually, when I came back from the coma, when I came out of the coma, I knew I was already healed. I was just waiting for my body to catch up. I knew I was done with cancer. I didn’t care what the doctors said. I knew I was done, and it wasn’t coming back.

1:16:50 It’s amazing, you know. I might look like a banker, and I used to be a banker, but we we’ve had a few episodes on this show with a psychedelic experience, and there’s so many parallels here that I have to ask you, at least, because when I had an iasa, I had three iasa ceremonies and some psilocybin ceremonies. I feel like, as if my ego was just dying, my ego had an NDE or maybe it had a death experience. And so when I came back, I really finally had gratitude, and I appreciated things, and I understood the importance of relationships, and at the same time I had these nonlinear time experiences where all this stuff happened.

1:17:23 And some of it, so much of it, sounds so similar to what you went through. Is this something you hear a lot? Do people ask you and say, yeah, there are parallels here? What are your thoughts on that whole subject? There are parallels.

1:17:35 And again, I’m going to say something which could be really provocative, but what the heck, I believe that if we did more research into that state of mind and healing illnesses, we would probably have more success than what currently is going on in cancer research, and just poking around in medicine. I really believe that. I believe that too. And it’s interesting, they’re actually experimenting at Johns Hopkins in America, you know, just by using psilocybin and with people that have terminal cases.

1:18:10 Maybe they’re misdiagnosed, but a lot of times people at least experience a lot of these emotions, and start to come to terms with a lot of these emotions. And it’s just something that we, again, don’t talk about in this society. It’s kind of back to front, like you said. It’s just something that’s considered bad. Again, another word, called drug, and another word, called medicine.

1:18:30 We don’t seem to know the difference. Some of the medicines, some of the medicines, are anti-depressants and opiates, and some of the drugs are, you know, iasa and other things. Exactly. It seems like we have it kind of backwards sometimes. Totally.

1:18:43 And if I can add things like chemotherapy and all are a lot more toxic than, say, iasa. Right. Yeah, and again it’s this language piece, and there’s a whole kind of history hangover of all of these ways we’ve been kind of conditioned, which we then teach our kids for the first 20 years of their life. Exactly. probably stuff I’m teaching my 10-year-old right now, and I’ve got to rethink it.

1:19:02 You know, maybe, yeah, yeah, maybe the university isn’t that important. But I want to get to that. Someone asked a very interesting question about you. They want to ask about your meditation and your spiritual exercises, you know, in relation to the NDE or the OB or the second body. They just talk about their own kind of experiences with lucid dreaming, or that, but I’m curious, what is your spiritual practice?

1:19:24 It’s very simple. It’s not that I take out a certain time every day to meditate, but throughout the day I’m conscious of constantly letting go. Like, if I have a bad experience or with somebody, or I have a brush with somebody that doesn’t feel good, and then I’m feeling agitated, I immediately am able to tell myself, okay, let it go. So I just do some breathing, and I feel it released. Because what a lot of people don’t realize is that we go through our day doing intense things, feeling tension being stressed out, trying to catch transport, being late for work, dealing with a boss, blah, blah, blah, and all this tension builds up in our bodies, and it gets tighter and tighter, and we do this day in and day out.

1:20:12 We go home. We deal with our kids, and there’s no point where we let it release, and we’re just building this up. I don’t allow that to build up anymore. So that’s one of my practices, is I have constant reminders, maybe 20, 30 times in a day, I’m sort of checking in with my body, that there’s no tension, so I can actually feel that there’s no tension in my body, and I’m releasing it all. So that’s one thing I do.

1:20:41 The other thing I do is that I ensure that I’m not taking in too much information, and what I mean by this is that there are, that we have a tendency to constantly be researching things on the internet, reading, watching videos, working, playing with our devices, and constantly there’s this input, input, input, input What happens when you constantly are in input mode? There’s no room in your mind, in your thought process, for your inner voice, your higher self, whatever, to communicate with you. So every often, it doesn’t have to be the same time of day.

1:21:32 You can call it a meditation and most people don’t, you know. They try meditating, but they don’t see the purpose of it. So what I’m telling you is the purpose of meditation. So for me, it’s basically just telling myself, okay, stop, stop, no input whatsoever. I’m just going to stop, and I’m going to focus on my body for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and during that time I find I get the best insights, the most inspiration, whether it’s for something for my next workshop, my next speech, my next book, or even just guidance on what to do next, or the next move in my life.

1:22:15 So I tend to take very frequent breaks of just no input. Right. Do you think information is toxic, or too much information is? I think the information itself is not toxic, but I think our obsession with the information is toxic towards ourselves. Right.

1:22:38 And I think if we can, when we stop obsessing and pursuing and chasing and researching information, what I find happens to me is that if I just stop and then I just allow stuff to come in. So basically our higher self or guides or inner voice cannot communicate with you until you have a gap between your thoughts. I find that what happens when I allow myself to do this, and then I go out into the world, I find I attract the right information at the right time.

1:23:17 Like, the right book will fall into my lap, the right website, or someone will send me the link, or I’ll bump into the right teacher, the right guru, the right person when I allow it to come in, rather than me constantly chasing and pursuing. Right, right, because you’re in a state to receive that. You almost, as in, the teacher appears when the student is ready. Yes. You know, these days with social media, I’m guilty of it as well.

1:23:42 It’s that there’s so much information at your fingertips, you can always check something, and so I just catch myself lately, and I’m like, why are you doing that? And you’re so used to being in a state of constant, you know, and you can call it research, which used to be a good thing but now it’s almost a way of keeping our mind full, or keeping our mind not even being quiet or reflecting on ourselves. Or yeah, it’s dangerous. It is, and particularly if somebody is dealing with an illness, and I say this because this is the way I was when I was diagnosed with cancer, all I wanted to do was get on the internet and research and research the kind of cancer I had, the cures for it, what to do, what are the natural things, and I was obsessed with reading about it.

1:24:26 I would order everything that everybody recommended for it. I would say, if you’re experiencing that, stop, because that’s just feeding the fear And instead of doing that, instead of constantly going out searching for information, searching for supplements, searching for everything, and buying up everything. Just stop completely, stop, and instead communicate with your own body. And I would even ask questions, like in my own mind, in the silence, just ask questions to myself: how can I love myself more?

1:25:04 How can I support myself more? What is my body trying to communicate to me by manifesting this particular challenge? Things like that. I would ask these questions and see what comes up. So powerful, those words.

1:25:18 I’m just thinking of the person that’s listening to us or watching us that’s in the middle of an experience with cancer right now, and what they’re thinking about you telling them that, because it’s such a natural human reaction with the internet these days, just like you said, just to get, so just to dive in head first. I mean, how can you not, you know? I guess when it’s something that’s happening to you. Yeah, but at the same time, it can be, I guess, a dangerous thing to do, because what happens is you’ll read something, and then you’ll read something else that contradicts that, and then you’ll read something else that’s completely different, and you get, and you’re trying to alleviate your fear.

1:25:54 That’s why you’re reading all this, but instead you become more fearful. You go down this whole downward spiral. That’s what happened to me, that no matter what I did, I was wondering, is this right? Is this feeding the cancer? Is this making it worse, or is it making it better?

1:26:11 Right? How do you feel about the phrase fighting cancer? A lot of people come out and say they don’t like it, because they think it puts the wrong metaphor, or survivors of cancer, or it puts them in this noble state that they shouldn’t be, because they’re not different from other people? How do you feel about that whole phrase or that whole idea? Yeah, I don’t use fighting cancer.

1:26:32 I don’t, I didn’t either, and I didn’t use the word remission either. So yeah, thank you. You’re impressed. I am impressed. Okay, so why don’t you like fighting cancer?

1:26:42 Because it’s like fighting against my own body, and I’m not fighting. I’m loving my body. I think that instead of fighting cancer and fighting something that my body has manifested, I’d rather nurture my body and communicate with it and care for it and take care of it and try and understand it and understand why it’s manifesting. I think we need to love ourselves first. Okay, that’s a huge theme that keeps coming.

1:27:09 A couple more questions Someone said, be careful of believing this kind of anecdote. They’re all guilty of the post hoc fallacy, i.e., they believe that since they got better, they must have gotten better because of what they were doing at the time. Then they said, case in point, Steve Jobs, who killed himself by doing you know, the Eastern kind of natural stuff, as opposed to medical treatment. I don’t know if those two are related, but what do you say about that kind of post hoc fallacy, as in, you survived, so it must be because of this, is that something you get asked before?

1:27:41 Or a survivorship bias, they call it sometimes, because a certain percentage of people will survive, and then you look to them and say, oh, they survived because they’re an albino? When it happened, maybe more randomly. Now you survived, and you have this mindset. I mean, I guess they’re saying be careful of believing that, because it not, it might not have causation, it might just have correlation. Yeah, it could be just random.

1:28:02 It could, and maybe it is. Maybe everything I’ve said is completely is completely wrong, but I guess I don’t claim to actually know the cure for cancer. But one thing I do feel is that the the answer, or the cure for cancer, will not come from just studying drugs or medicine alone. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that, and I think that what I would like to do is to bring to light an area that is not studied when it comes to looking for a cure for cancer, right?

1:28:49 You know, this whole love-yourself message is something that you talk about. And I mean, just, I think we covered a lot of it. But you’re saying love authentically, and move from surviving to thriving, from fear to freedom I think you covered that earlier, saying that I’m not in remission. I’m, you know, I’m doing this, and so I guess, is it all about, you know, being grateful and being kind of excited to be alive? And I guess I guess, I guess that all stuff, that all comes from loving yourself, is that the simplest message you give people?

1:29:19 Is just start with the self and start with loving yourself? And that really is, it’s actually a lot simpler than we make it out to be. We seem to make it really complicated. But life is actually really simple, because when we love ourselves we actually allow ourselves to relax, to have fun, to laugh, to even eat a piece of chocolate and not feel guilty about it. We really allow ourselves.

1:29:46 We have become a pathologically fearful, uptight race of people. We really have, as a, you know, all of us as a culture, most of us, and so basically I think we’ve forgotten. We’ve forgotten how to have fun. We’ve forgotten how to laugh. We’ve forgotten how to love other people.

1:30:06 We’ve forgotten how to trust. All that is forgotten, and maybe cancer is a way that we’ve manifested to try and remind us to become human again. I’m thinking about people in relationships, with people who are friends, that are having hard times or depressed or in bad states, and I’m just thinking I guess what you should be trying to do is find a way for them to learn how to love themselves, right? Because that’s the best thing they can do for themselves, right?

1:30:34 And the best thing you can do for them is not to criticize them or tell them what to do with their lives. It’s to find some way for them to love themselves. Yes, if we can all find some way, and basically the question to ask ourselves every time is, what would I be doing if I did love myself? So if somebody is dealing with something like depression if somebody’s dealing with even an illness, what I suggest they do is, first of all, ask yourself, what would I do if I loved myself?

1:31:03 And another thing is, if you’re dealing with an illness, pretend that the doctor has just given you a clean bill of health. You are completely healed this minute. You’ve been told you are healed. You have your life to live now. You can do what you want.

1:31:20 What would you do? What would you do right now? First of all, go and celebrate, and what would you do with the rest of your life? Now go and do it anyway. and stop making the decisions based on your circumstances, on your illness, or on your circumstances.

1:31:35 We become obsessed with our circumstances. And this is why, you know, when somebody’s dealing with an illness, another thing I tell them is, stop focusing on your illness. Stop thinking every single day, how am I going to beat this, how am I going to fight it? Instead, think about what you would do if you were well, and then go out and do it. So even if you have to go to your treatments and so on, go to them as though you’re running an errand, but don’t make that the focal point of your day.

1:32:07 Make your life about your life. Start finding your joy again start laughing again, start doing things that are fun. Amazing words. I’m going through all these things in my head right now So I have just different scenarios, but one thing I thought of is, I was in New York City many years ago and I had a really bad breakup with a girlfriend, and she had left me, and it was just crushing from my life. And I think, like, a year later I just had this realization, and I was like, how could she love someone that didn’t love themselves?

1:32:34 And so I was like, the biggest realization to myself, and I was just like, it’s so hard when you don’t love yourself, when you step out that door in the morning, you know, all these bad things are going to happen to you, you know, because you’re not putting yourself first, and you’re not believing in you, and so it’s very hard for anyone else to have any kind of a positive reaction when you’re in that state. Exactly. And also, you bring that person into the world, and as I said before, that’s the energy you would exude.

1:33:02 It’s, you know, like you can always tell when somebody is happy, and you just want to be around them. So you just, we just bring it on to ourselves. Yeah, I pick up energy of everybody these days, and I don’t know if it’s a posture thing, and they don’t even have to say anything. I just feel it, and you’re like I want to be with that person. I don’t want to be that person.

1:33:19 Anita, I always ask people a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you as well. If you can make a phone call to the 20-year-old Anita Moorjani, and give that young lady a bit of advice. What would you tell her? I would tell her, love yourself like your life depends on it, because it does.

1:33:38 And I would tell her, but don’t take yourself or life too seriously. Laugh a lot. Don’t be afraid to eat the chocolate. Good advice. Best advice you’ve ever received?

1:33:50 Yeah, best advice you ever received in your life. It might have actually been from you but what was that? If you had to put it into one thing, probably in the other realm, from my dad, when he said now that you know the truth of who you really are, go back and live your life fearlessly. I’m curious if you ever see people forced with really hard circumstances in their life, whether it be a loss or cancer or something, is part of you thinking you’re going to just be so much better a person this way, or you’re going to grow so much, or you’re, this is going to be a fruitful time for you somehow?

1:34:24 I mean, do you see things kind of like that a little bit differently? I feel that they, that things that happened to us, like cancer, and so on. Everything in life, everything in my life, I’ve always felt that it’s been a gift in the end. I’ve always realized it’s been a gift. At the time I’m going through it, it doesn’t feel like a gift.

1:34:51 But like, the cancer has been the biggest gift that life could have given me. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And so because of what’s happened to me, I realize that even if somebody is going through a painful situation right now, when they come out of it, it will make way for something much better to come into their lives. Right, that’s very good for people to hear. The last part is to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us somewhere around the world, you know, on audio or on video.

1:35:23 What advice do you give to them? I would say, make your choices out of love. Life is a gift. It can be amazing, and beautiful, and live it to the fullest, but don’t take life too seriously. Learn to laugh.

1:35:42 Laugh every day, and live life to the fullest. Anita, thank you so much for being here. The book is Dying to Be Me. It’s fantastic. It’s a fantastic story.

1:35:53 I think I was a victim of focusing on the details of your life, and you know, and the episode itself, as opposed to the message. And the message is a wonderful message, and I, and I guess we should be thankful for the circumstances that, you know, happened, because it brought this great message you know, and I think we can talk about the details of the cancer and the medical records, and that but to miss your message would be a crying shame, you know, when people hear your story. So, I’m so glad you came here and talked to us, and I really appreciate you being open and coming on the show.

1:36:27 Thank you. It’s been a pleasure being here. I’ve enjoyed it. You asked some really great questions. Thank you very much.

1:36:33 If people want to come to one of your workshops to listen to your talk, just to find out what’s going on? I know you produce a lot of video as well. What’s the best way? A website, YouTube My website, that’s anita.com, or my Facebook page. On both there’s an events tab, and I do have something like 16 speaking events this year, in a different city, all of them in all 16 different cities, so they might be one near you.

1:37:00 And so you’re going around the world? Oh, going around the world, yes. Everywhere, like, from, yeah, here UK US, Australia, Europe, every, see, Croatia. You’re very busy. All right, fantastic.

1:37:15 Thank you so much for being here. we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I think your life pretty much is about that as well, and so thanks so much for being here, and I’m really glad I had this time to spend with you. I think everyone got so much out of this. And I said, I think it’s funny that cancer touches everyone in this world somehow, and so it’s a word that always has all these connotations in mind, and someone knows someone that’s going to suffer from it, or they will someday, and so in a weird way it’s a great way for people to finally pay attention to your message.

1:37:43 So in a weird way, it’s kind of a a helpful thing, you know, for people to pay attention. You know, so there you go. Thank you so much Anita, and I wish you all the best. Thank you.