Anita Moorjani - Embracing Life: The Inspirational Journey of Anita Moorjani

Full transcript: Anita Moorjani on London Real

4:40 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Anita Moorjani, the international speaker and author of the New York Times bestselling book Dying To Be Me. In 2006 you were terminally ill after suffering from four years of cancer, with large lemon-sized tumors all over your body. You then had a near-death experience and subsequently made a remarkable, rapid recovery, which dramatically changed the way you live your life.

5:03 These days you tour the world speaking on stages to sold-out audiences about your powerful message of embodying love in a fear-based world. You’ve written your latest book, What If This Is Heaven? How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us From Experiencing Heaven on Earth. Anita, welcome back to London Real. Wow, thank you, Brian, and I’m so honored to be back.

5:22 You know, it’s been three and a half years, and the first time you were here was so powerful and our audience responded in just such a massive way. It’s still, it’s been watched almost 300,000 times, and your story really resonates with people, and you were a big part of the early London Real, so thank you for that. What have you been up to in the last three years? Life’s been a little crazy, probably crazier than I expected or wanted it to be, but I’ve been speaking, touring, I’m writing my third book, and I’m involved in a Hollywood movie.

5:58 A movie is being made of my life story. Wow. What is that like, that process and just someone making a movie about your life? And yeah, what would we not know? What it’s like to actually be part of that?

6:10 Is it strange? Is it good? Is it bad? It is really strange because, because I lived my life, I don’t think of myself as being different or special, so it feels weird that people would want to make a movie about my life. The whole process feels really surreal.

6:30 It feels, I still can’t believe it sometimes. You know, the touring, the speaking, the fact that people would want to publish another book written by me, so it’s, it’s it feels really weird, but the movie-making process has been quite beautiful because the people who are making the movie is a group of dynamic Hollywood women. They’re an independent movie company. So they came to me and made me an offer where they said, we’re going to treat your movie with the honor that it deserves, because my movie, well, you know, when I was first approached, the people who possibly may have made it, there was a possibility that they would have what we call whitewashed the movie.

7:19 Right, in other words, they wanted to cast all white people and I wanted, I wanted it to be people of my color, my race, to represent me, who played me and my family. Well, that makes sense. Yeah, these days with so many outlets, you know, like Netflix and these other things, there’s a real market for independent film. Yes, and they are honoring it in that they, you know, they want to stick to the truth, the story, they want to keep it authentic, and of course they want to have actors to play the parts that are of the same ethnicity, like they’re hiring Indian people or people who are Indian by race.

8:00 Okay, and your parents were both Indian and you grew up in Hong Kong, was that right? That’s right. Okay, all right, and so we’re keeping it true to that. What is the process like? Are they writing the script, are they filming, and what do you think it’ll be out?

8:13 Right now they’re thick, deep into writing the script. I’m a consultant to the script writer and she is fabulous. So the whole team is women. So they’re not small players in Hollywood, they’re big players, but they’re independent, a group of three women that have come together who were moved by my story, and so they wanted to do this. Their heart is in it, and this is what I love, they’re doing it from the place of their heart.

8:40 They feel that it’s something the world needs right now, so it feels really good to be part of that team, because when we meet up and when we talk about the script and the screenplay and what’s going to happen and who we’re going to get and who they’re going to get to play the roles, it just, it’s, there’s a lot of bonding that goes on between us, the three women and myself, and we laugh and we eat and we we tend to have our meetings over a meal, and so it is a lot of fun. It feels great to be part of something like this. That’s good, and the final product will show all of that.

9:16 I know it will. You know, we’ve been making movies here at London Real since we saw you. We just finished our fourth, and you know the reason you’re doing it, the big why, all of your values, your core mission, it all shows up in the film, and if you have other alternate ideas or if you have other agendas, it’ll ruin the movie. So, exactly. I’m glad you’re doing that, and the script is a hard thing to write.

9:40 Yeah, and get it perfect. So you know, a lot of people still don’t know your story, and so I was wondering if you could maybe take us back to 2001, which was, funny enough, a tough year for me. I was actually in New York City and I was going through my own demons, but you know, we know the Anita now, you know, that talks about love and is very connected to maybe who you are and who we all should be. But what was Anita like back in 2001? Who were you, and what kind of person, and values, and how did you look at the world?

10:12 In 2001 I was a very different person, at least outwardly. I was somebody who was extremely timid, non-confrontational. I’m still pretty non-confrontational and have trouble saying no, I don’t think that ever goes away, but now I’m in a position where I need to do these things. At that time I didn’t need to, and I was someone who was a people pleaser. I was a doormat.

10:44 I always tried very hard to fit in, to not disappoint other people. I was very fearful as well. I had two people close to me who were going through cancer in 2001, both of them very, both of them had very aggressive forms of cancer, and they looked like they were not going to survive. Actually neither of them did survive, but at that point in 2001 it already looked like that, and so I found myself fearing cancer. Both of these people were my age.

11:19 One was my husband’s brother-in-law and the other one was my best friend. My best friend was like a sister to me, so watching them go through cancer was very fearful, and reading at that time, there was so much content and material out about cancer, as there is today, but statistics like one in three people will get cancer. So when I was watching it so close to home, I started to really fear cancer. Wow. Yeah, and where did it go from there?

11:51 So I then started to do everything I could to avoid getting cancer. So I would read everything about cancer prevention, I would research cancer prevention, I would order all the supplements that were cancer prevention supplements like antioxidants, I was following all the the food suggestions, I was cutting out dairy and sugar and red meats and all the things that I believed caused cancer, and I was in fact probably doing everything that is recommended on an anti-cancer diet, but guess what happened? I got cancer.

12:36 Wow. Yeah, because everything I was doing was from this place of fear of avoiding cancer. So I was so focused on cancer, I was researching cancer all the time. And you think you brought it on yourself? I did, and yet there’s another component to it which I want to say here, is that because I was also such an introverted people pleaser person, a doormat person if you will, and I was, when my best friend was going through cancer, I was there for her, and I found that I was there for everybody, that was just my personality.

13:20 I couldn’t say no to people, I was non-confrontational, and so I found that when I was not with my friend, for example, if I was out doing something for myself, if I was out for dinner or going shopping, I would feel really guilty that my best friend had cancer. She was dying, she was in the hospital, and here I am enjoying myself. And so I would find that all the free time I had, I would spend with my friend, and I felt I needed to be there for her and take care of her, and that’s what a good friend did.

13:55 And so I would do that to the point of getting drained. Even when I was tired I would do that, because to do anything else I would feel guilty, because she was in the hospital dying. And then when I got my own cancer diagnosis, amidst the fear of getting that diagnosis, there was a small part of me that felt, ah, now I have a reason to take care of myself. Wow, wow. And do you remember what it was like when you got that diagnosis?

14:24 I do, I remember it like it was yesterday. And what had happened, did you feel like a lump and you went to the doctor, or how did that happen? So I had a lump on this side of my neck, on, and this is my left side, so I had a lump right there. And I went to the doctor, and the doctor at first they said, oh, it could just be swollen glands, and so they gave me antibiotics and they said, come back in a week or two and let’s see if it’s gone down. It hadn’t gone down, it hadn’t softened or anything, so then they sent me for a biopsy, and that’s when the results came back that I had lymphoma.

15:02 Wow. And when he told you that, I really appreciate your honesty by saying part of you thought “Now I’m going to take care of myself.” What was the rest of you thinking? The rest of me was really in fear. I was in fear that what was in store for me was the same as what I was seeing my best friend go through and what I was seeing my husband’s brother-in-law go through, which was their bodies were deteriorating, they were having aggressive forms of chemotherapy, they were going to the best cancer hospitals that money can buy, basically having the best cancer treatments, and yet they weren’t getting better, they were getting worse.

15:45 Their hair was falling out, other secondary problems were developing. I was watching them deteriorate and that was really, really scary. Really scary. But on the other side of it was that I had been spending all my time watching my best friend, watching her health go down, watching her deteriorate, and it hurt me, it pained me to see her, and yet when I wasn’t with her I would feel guilty because I knew she wanted me to spend time with her. Now, having my own diagnosis, you see, I was someone that could never say no.

16:22 Now I was able to say, I have to take care of my health. I have to go and figure out how I’m going to heal this. I had a reason. And this is part of my message today for people. My message is that, don’t wait for the reason.

16:38 You don’t need a reason to take care of yourself. You don’t even need a reason to go do something joyful for yourself. You don’t need to feel guilty. And so that’s really part of my message. So your cancer diagnosis was actually the start of your healing.

16:53 Yes, exactly. I like that. It really was. And what are these next months and years like after you get that diagnosis? What is happening to you?

17:03 How are you feeling? How is your body reacting? So one of the first things I did was, interestingly, some instinctual part of me must have known this, I decided to remove myself from Hong Kong, which is where I was going through, you know, which is where my best friend was going through her illness. And I had a reason now. I said that I want to try a different form of treatment, and I want to go to India and I want to spend my time doing yoga and follow Ayurveda.

17:41 Now, had it been, had I not had a cancer diagnosis, I would have, I would not have taken that time out to do that trip, to do that for myself. It was like I needed the cancer to go and spend six months in India doing this, and I watched myself improve as I did this. But what happened is after about six months I thought I was good. I went back to Hong Kong, and after I went back and I went back into the old environment and my friend was deteriorating even more, and as she deteriorated more, people were saying to me, how is yours?

18:25 How’s your cancer? And I kept trying to say, I’m fine. They said, yes, but have you gone in again for more scans? And I said, I don’t need to, I know I’m good. And they said, no, you’ve, when I said I have gone an alternative route, they said, no, you’re crazy, you’ve got to do it this way.

18:45 Don’t follow all those other alternative quackery stuff, you’ve got to do it the way the doctors say you’ve got it. So when people started saying all this, and then I watched my best friend die, I got into this whole fear thing again and I could actually feel it coming back in my body, and then I went the whole medical route after that. Wow. What was it like when she passed? It was very fearful for me because on the one hand I missed her.

19:17 I painfully missed her because she was my best friend. We were friends since we were five years old. We were like sisters and so much of our lives had been parallel since we were children. But so there was the huge part of missing her and then there was this huge fear as well, this fear that, oh my gosh, I now have to deal with this cancer which she’s just gone through, she’s succumbed to it. And people that knew us thought it was the oddest thing, that they knew us as two very close friends and first one gets it, then the other.

19:55 Wow. But that’s not odd to you, it makes sense to you now? To me it makes sense now, yes. And I just want to say, so back in 2003, 2004, even going the alternate way is a pretty strong move on your part. I mean, this is, you know, there’s not a lot of videos and not that much information out there, so you know, that was a pretty conscious decision on your part.

20:13 It was, only because I saw what my husband’s brother-in-law and my best friend were going through with the chemotherapy and the radiation, it wasn’t helping them. To me it looks like it was killing them, and so I made that conscious decision, but it was really hard because I didn’t feel I was supported in that decision, and people would call me and put doubts in my mind, and that was really hard, to get calls from people saying that you’re not doing the right thing, you’re making the wrong choice. What was really particularly hard for me is that if they could say, you’re making the wrong choice, look how conventional medicine is helping these people, but I’m looking at these people that are close to me and they’re getting worse, not better.

21:01 It was so, so I was even more scared. So it was like I was scared of the cancer, I was scared of the treatment, and I was scared of death. I was in a terrible place. Wow, wow. What happens next in Hong Kong?

21:17 You decide to go into treatment. So what happened is that when I finally agreed to go to treatment, that was when the doctors said it was too late. It was too far gone. They said that it had spread too much, and so they actually said that, had you come for treatment earlier we probably could have been able to help you, but now it’s too far gone, and we will give you the treatment but it’s not going to help. And what do you make of that conclusion, or what did you make of that conclusion?

21:50 So at that point what happened is my husband tried to keep as much of that information from me as possible, because the doctors actually told him that, so he didn’t tell me the whole thing, and I’m glad he didn’t, because what I did was I dabbled with more. He didn’t tell me that the doctors had drawn their conclusion, it was over, so I continued to dabble with alternative and with a combination, but I continued to deteriorate until until February the 2nd of 2006. That was when I actually went into a coma.

22:31 But at that point, just to give the full picture, my organs had started to shut down. My body had stopped absorbing nutrition. I weighed about 86 pounds. I didn’t have the strength or the energy to walk. I couldn’t even hold my head up like this, my head was hanging down, my neck just didn’t have the strength to hold my head up.

23:00 And I had tumors the size of golf balls or lemons from the base of my skull, all around my neck, under my arms, in my chest, and all the way down to my abdomen. My lungs were filled with fluid, I couldn’t lie flat or I would choke on my own fluid, and so I was, I couldn’t walk, so I was always in bed, but I was propped up because of the fluid in my lungs. I had open skin lesions. And then on February the second my organs started to shut down, and then I went into a coma.

23:36 Wow. And you had been in the hospital then, for months at that point? No, I was actually being cared for at home with a private nurse. I had 24-hour care, I couldn’t be left alone because I could have stopped breathing at any time. I was connected to oxygen.

23:51 Even at home I was connected to oxygen. So my mom was there taking care of me, she had flown in, she was living in India, I was living in Hong Kong, but my mom had flown in, my husband was there, and we had a private nurse as well, full time. And what’s your mental state like from those, those three months up until that date in February? I mean, are you there, even, are you coherent to what’s happening, are you in pain, are you lost, are you sad, do you remember?

24:21 Yeah, I do. I was in a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, like a lot of discomfort. I wasn’t comfortable. You know, if I sat up after a little while I’d start wheezing, if I lie down I start wheezing. I was so tired, I couldn’t sleep solid for eight hours without waking up and choking, which is why somebody had to be there 24/7.

24:47 And I was connected to the oxygen and I was heavily, heavily drugged up on medication, including morphine, just to ease the pain. I was, the medication was being injected into me, and then when it got to a point where I was just drowsy, incoherent, that’s when, when the doctor, oh, and a doctor, my doctor was seeing me, my husband was taking me to the hospital to see the doctor, I was going in and out of the hospital for treatment. I hated being in the hospital, I found it depressing, so I would always want to go back home.

25:28 We were really lucky that our insurance covered me to be able to be taken care of at home by a nurse. But on February the 2nd, when I was like really not just completely out of it, not responding, that’s when the doctor said to my husband, get her to the hospital right away, and he got me to the hospital and then I fell into a coma when I got to the hospital. Wow. So coma, you lose consciousness, and you’re 86 pounds. I mean, that’s, it’s inconceivable.

26:03 I know. I look at the pictures and it doesn’t look like me. And I could share some pictures with you later. Yeah, I’d like to see those. So what happens next?

26:13 You go into a coma, you’re in the hospital. Yes, and then when I’m in the coma though, of course everybody’s frantic and the doctors have told my family that these are my final hours and I’m not coming back, and now my organs have shut down. So all this is going on and they’re inserting tubes and things into my veins, but unbeknownst to all of them, I can see and hear and feel everything. But the best part is, I feel great. The pain is gone, I no longer feel attached to the body.

26:53 It’s like my physical body, my eyes are closed, but I could see my body. I realized I was outside of my body. I could see my body lying there on the bed, and I was outside my body but I could see everything else that was happening around my body, and I felt so free and light, and the fear was gone. That was the biggest thing, the fear was gone. It just felt incredible.

27:21 For the first time in many years the fear was gone. Many years, four years with the cancer and years before that. Exactly, and it, I mean, I felt better than I had ever felt, ever, in physical life before. Did you note to yourself at the time that this is strange, that I feel great, put it in a coma? I know, it did.

27:40 I did note that to myself, I thought, wow, this does feel strange. You know, and I didn’t know what was happening, I just thought, wow, this feels incredible, this feels really strange. And then I even thought, am I dying? Is this what it feels like to die? I even started to wonder that, and I thought, if this is death, it’s not so bad at all, it’s not scary like I thought, because it’s almost like, I had grown so accustomed to the fear that when it was gone, I had never noticed.

28:19 You know, I give it the word fear after the fact, after coming out of it. When I was in my life before the near-death experience, I didn’t know I was living in a state of fear. I thought that was normal human existence, or normal existence. It was only when I was out of it. So it’s kind of like, you know, when you don’t realize the noise of an air conditioner until it goes off and only then do you go, oh yeah, there was noise.

28:51 That’s what it was. I didn’t realize that I had lived my life in a state of fear until the fear was gone. Wow, that’s so powerful. And how many people are living in their lives, I mean, you must see them all the time. I do.

29:05 I think, oh, it’s normal to be anxious about all these things around me I can’t control. Yeah, and so now I recognize the fear because I know what it’s like to be without it. So when people say, oh, you know, can you still maintain that state after so long? I say yes, because you know what it is, you know what being without the fear is, and that’s what that state is, and I call it a state of love. And love is really overused and it’s also misunderstood, but to me, the, I feel, just if I were to give it words, you know, the English language lacks words for this kind of phenomena, because we dismiss this kind of thing as not being true or not being real, so we haven’t assigned words to these emotions, these feelings, but I tend to like to use the words love and fear.

30:00 To me the lack of fear is love, or love is the lack of fear. I’ve realized you can’t have both simultaneously, and so what I’ve realized, that the best way to explain to people, that if you want to lose that fear, work on increasing love and then you’ll experience that. Okay, that’s powerful. What happens next? You’re out of body, you’re looking at this, you’re having these incredible realizations, you’re asking yourself if you’re dying.

30:30 What happens next? Well, the next thing that happens is I realize that I am dying, because I start to become aware of other beings, if you will, around me, and some of these beings I recognize and some I don’t. I’m aware that my best friend is with me, and my dad, my dad who’d passed away 10, 11 years prior to this experience. So he was there and I feel that they’re there to guide me through this process. And now in life, in physical life, my dad, my relationship with my dad had been very turbulent, but interestingly, in this state of being without the physical body, all I can feel from my dad is pure unconditional love.

31:21 And I realize that even things like turbulent relationships, all that is part of the physical, we don’t take it with us when we’re there. It’s because of all the, all the filters and the beliefs through which we communicate with each other, and that’s what lends to the turbulence, but we leave all that behind. You see, because my dad, my parents are Indian, I’m Indian, ethnically Indian, my parents are Hindu, and my dad had wanted me to have an arranged marriage, and I didn’t.

32:01 When I was growing up I was being groomed for an arranged marriage. I rebelled against it. I had a very Cyndi Lauper personality. What does that mean? That means, so I was a big girl, I just want to have fun.

32:16 Yes, exactly. In Hong Kong that was my freedom song. I loved Cyndi Lauper. I used to spray paint my hair with these colored hair sprays that were all the rage at that time in the 80s. I used to spray my hair the neon colors and I used to play that song, and it used to drive my dad crazy.

32:38 Because isn’t the video of her as well having fun and rebelling against her parents? Exactly. See, that video was, that was me. You know, I would watch that and I would think, oh my god, that is so me. And it would drive my parents crazy, especially my dad, because he wanted me to have an arranged marriage, and it was the first thing from my mind.

32:59 I wanted my freedom, I wanted to earn my own money so that I could travel the world. I knew an arranged marriage meant no more freedom, no traveling, nothing. Anyway, eventually I did succumb to an arranged marriage but I ran away, which brought a lot of shame to my family. So I always felt that I disappointed my dad, I always felt that I’d be judged by him on the other side. But here I was with the essence of my dad, and my essence and his essence, and all I felt from him was pure unconditional love.

33:35 Wow. And you know, and that’s when I realized that all of this stuff, the gender disparity, the, our cultures, our beliefs, our gender, all of that gets left behind, we don’t take it with us when we cross over, we’re just energy at that point. Yeah, not these weird physical hang-ups or language hang-ups or so you’re getting a lot of knowledge here when you’re out of body. I mean, these are a lot of very interesting lessons that you’re getting. Yeah.

34:06 Are they telling you to do something or guiding you or? Yes, so eventually I get told by my dad that it’s not my time, actually my dad and my best friend, that I need to go back, but no part of me wants to come back because my physical body is dying. And so, and so, do you think there’s a risk at that point of you dying if they hadn’t have said no, you need to go back? Do you think they were there to remind you that it wasn’t time and you could have easily gone?

34:38 I would have gone if they weren’t there to remind me to go back, I would have stayed on that side, I would have gone onward into that side. Yeah, but you had work to do back here on earth. They told me I had work to do, they wanted me to know that I had already suffered and I had gifts waiting for me, and they wanted me to know that now that I knew what I knew, meaning what I was now learning by experiencing what I was experiencing, they wanted me to know that now that I knew this, that when I go back my body would heal very quickly.

35:14 Wow, that’s pretty deep. All right, so you trust them and you go back. Is that a conscious decision to go back, I’m going back in this body, yeah, that’s painful and emaciated and looking terminally ill? Yes, it was a conscious decision to come back. My dad actually said, his final words before I came back was, now you know the truth, go back and live your life fearlessly.

35:39 And what he meant was, be yourself fearlessly, because I had always been afraid, and really at the crux of it, the crux of fear, it’s the fear of being yourself. That’s super powerful. All right, you go back in. How long are you in this coma for? So it’s a day and a half, about 30, 34 hours.

36:03 So as soon as he says that, that now that you know the truth, go back and live your life fearlessly, in those moments my eyes started to open on my physical body, my eyes started to open and and at that time I was kind of delirious, I had one foot on each side, so I could see this world but I hadn’t completely left that one, and my husband and my mom was there and my brother was now there, he had flown in from India. And while I was in the other side I could feel that connection with my brother as well. I mean, there was so much I learned, which we’ll get into, because I realized that we are actually all connected.

36:52 But so when I open my eyes, I see them and they are ecstatic that I look like I’m coming out of the coma, and they’re saying, oh wow, welcome back in, and I’m saying, Dad is here, Dad is here, don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m fine, stop worrying so much. And they’re wondering what am I talking about, so they call the doctor. The doctor tells them that I’m still critical, maybe, you know, and tells them that I’m delirious, maybe my eyes have opened but I’m still emaciated, I’m still connected to all the tubes and machines, and the doctor still says, you know, but she’s still critical, don’t read anything into her opening her eyes.

37:35 But then I actually start to say things to the doctor of things that he was doing to me while I was in the coma. I just said something like, didn’t you, didn’t you take fluid out of my lungs at about four or five this morning? And he said, yeah, but how do you know that? And I said, I saw you. And he said, you couldn’t have, excuse me, he said, you couldn’t have, you were in the coma.

38:01 And I said, really? See, I didn’t even know I was in a coma because I was so confused as to whether I was on this side or that side. And then he said, anyway, get some rest, and that’s when he told my family, she’s still critical, and he left the room, and I started to tell my family things that I heard and I saw them do, and that’s when they knew something had happened. And the next few days you’re still conscious? Yes.

38:31 And so over the next four days I started to get more clarity and regain more consciousness, but the tumors shrunk by seventy percent in four days. Four days. And the doctors could not believe it, they didn’t even know what to write in the medical records. And how do they explain it, and how do you explain it? So they have difficulty explaining it, they try to attribute it to different things that they did and they tried, and I guess, you know, because at that time, in that moment when it was happening, they actually said, we don’t know what to write in your medical records.

39:12 Now when you ask them they say, oh, you know, it could have been us getting the fluid out on time, or the chemo finally responding, or they’ll have different, they’ll try and attribute different explanations, but I know what happened. I know that at that time they were completely confused, but I know internally what happened. Right, and they said the chemo that you had had finally caught up and then it worked at that instant. Yes. And they also say if they hadn’t drained your lungs you would have died.

39:40 Yes. Right, and you don’t agree with that? No, I don’t, because I’d had my lungs drained eight, ten times already, I was going in for the draining every three weeks. Okay, all right. So shrink by seventy percent, and how are you feeling and what, you know, what happens after those few days?

39:58 So I was like really euphoric because I was watching it pan out, because there were so many things that I was shown, that I felt that my dad or whoever, all the others, or the universe, or the other people that were there that were showing me, that was the trajectory of my life. I didn’t feel they were forcing me to come back, but it was like, should you go back, this is what’s waiting for you, don’t waste it, it’s a gift, don’t waste it. And this is what I kept feeling was being, you know, that I was being pushed in this direction.

40:31 And so now over these days I was feeling it, I was seeing it pan out, I thought, wow, this is crazy, this is really amazing. They said that you would heal extremely quickly, they said that you have work to do, you don’t have to figure it out, you just have to be fearless about being yourself and you will see it unfold, your work, it will touch a lot of people more than you can imagine, but you don’t have to figure out how to do it. And I was like, but wait, I’m an introvert.

41:08 But they were, they, but I, it felt as though I was assured that, it’s okay, don’t worry, you’ll be taken care of. That’s what it felt like if I put words to it. Okay. It was beyond language but I’m putting words to it. And so you didn’t feel scared?

41:25 I didn’t feel scared. I kept feeling that the minute you feel you have to try to please everything, everyone, the minute you feel you have to try to please everyone or try really hard to get anything, that’s when it falls through the cracks. You just have to be yourself, you just have to honor yourself, be authentic and take care of yourself, don’t be afraid to say no. Everything was the opposite of what I had been conditioned to believe, everything. It was like I was conditioned to believe that I had to prove myself and chase and pursue what I wanted.

42:08 Here I was being told the opposite, no, you don’t have to do that. I’d been conditioned to believe that it was selfish to take care of myself and to honor myself and to find my joy and to do what I love to do. I was being told, no, that’s all you have to do, that’s all you have to do. Simple. It’s very simple, right?

42:28 Yeah, you just go back to these simple things. Be yourself, be authentic, replace fear with love. Yeah, and always go back to these principles. Yes. And so you know, I was kind of thinking, does that mean I don’t have to do anything?

42:42 And the response felt like, technically yes, you don’t have to do anything, but you will be doing things as a result of what’s unfolding. In other words, you don’t have to figure it out. Okay, okay, all right. And how much longer are you in the hospital? What is that next couple months like for you?

43:03 Do you gain weight? Does the cancer subside? What happens? So over the next few weeks the cancer just kept subsiding and the doctors were confused, they couldn’t believe what was going on, and so they they were doing all these different tests, they kept taking, they insisted on doing different tests. And at the time I actually said, I actually tried to argue with them and say, you don’t need to do the tests, I know I’m going to be fine, but they insisted, and so they wanted to do bone marrow biopsy, which was very painful, a lymph node, another lymph node biopsy, this time removing an entire lymph node from my neck, which was extremely painful.

43:51 But today, looking back, I’m glad I let them go through with all of that because I have all the test results to prove that there was no trace of cancer. They just, so within three and a half weeks they could find no trace of cancer in my body, and they didn’t know what to make of it, but they kept me there because they were still convinced that there was cancer, but they just were having trouble finding it. Eventually, at the end of five weeks, I was physically strong enough and I gained enough weight for them to let me go home.

44:27 And when you tell people this story, I mean, what do people say? Are all of the doctors, do they refute it, are they flabbergasted, like what do they say? It’s mixed. So they’re, so first of all, I’m very lucky that my own GP, my general practitioner, who is not an oncologist but he is my GP, and he was there throughout the journey with me, he saw it happen, he thought I was gone when I was in the coma, he knew the results, he knew the results from three months before when I was given the diagnosis that it was too late, so he knows and he believes me a hundred percent, so that was really great.

45:08 And there’s been another oncologist who has studied my story, he’s gone into my medical records, he’s looked at everything and he said, whichever way I look at it, you should be dead. But at the same time you do have people who are, I guess, who are really invested in their beliefs in the medical model, and when somebody is really invested in their beliefs, if something goes against it or doesn’t fit in, they have to find a way to discard it, they have to find a way to debunk what you’re saying, because otherwise it means changing everything that they believe and the way they do things. So there are a lot of people like that as well.

45:53 And does it bother you when they? No, not in the least. I don’t feel it’s my job to convince them. If someone’s made up their mind, you know, and if their life is invested in that, then it’s their choice entirely, you see. It doesn’t bother me in the sense that I don’t need people to believe me, but what I do feel is that life is so much easier when you can see it for what it really is.

46:20 But when you’re invested in a belief where there is nothing beyond the physical, where it can’t possibly be true that I experienced what I experienced, I’m sure life must be pretty hard, because I watch people and I watch them living in fear and I watch them struggling, and my only wish is for them to see that it doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t need them to believe me, but I do believe that after my, or I do feel that after my experience my life has got a lot easier and I wish I’d always known this. I want to talk about the changes you made in your life.

46:58 What happened to that cancer in your opinion, like what happened? You know, when you were having your out-of-body experience and then it all went away, was this energy in your body changing? How do you, how do you describe that? See, I actually believe that we are six sensory beings, not five sensory beings, we have much more than physical body, whereas the medical model is very much focused on the physical as being true and being real. So all our treatments are just targeted at the physical, but there is something more, something deeper, and I believe that the true healing of illnesses, chronic illnesses, lies in realizing that there is something more.

47:44 I mean, even when we go into things like using food as medicine, diet, nutrition, diet, nutrition is important for supporting the physical body. I don’t want to dismiss it and I don’t, you know, I mean it is, I do want to say it is important, but at the same time diet and nutrition also only focuses on the physical. There’s very little attention being paid to the fact that actually we are so much more. We are emotional beings. I mean, you’ve got two little children, don’t you see that they sense things, that they know when you walk into a room?

48:28 If you have pets, people who are listening in, I had a dog for 14 years. My dog knew when I was coming home 5-10 minutes before I walked in the door. If I’d been gone a week on a trip and he was being taken care of by someone else in my family, in my home, five or ten minutes before I walked in the door, before the car even pulled up anywhere near the building I lived in, he would be at the door with his tail wagging, knowing that I was going to walk in the door.

49:00 How does he know that? He knows that because we’re all connected. When we’re born we feel that connection, we know that connection. I’m sure you’ve noticed that in your babies. Yeah, they’re mostly emotional beings because they just let it flow.

49:15 Yeah, they haven’t been taught a paradigm of this is how the world works. Yes, perhaps so. And so they are constantly flowing with this emotion. So this sixth sense is like an energy and a motive, this other thing that we have, and we have to feed that just like we would feed a physical body and be aware of that, and we have to just treat it like any other sense. But we don’t, we’ve dismissed it.

49:39 In fact, those of us that feel it, we’re the ones that are told that we are woo-woo or we’re quacks or we’re crazy, and so we are forced to suppress it or hide it. But in fact, without it it’s harder to navigate the world. So we live, we are six sensory beings believing we are five sensory beings living in a world created by people who believe they are five sensory beings. So if I were to give you an analogy, let’s just say that when you were born you had all your six senses intact, right?

50:17 But now imagine instead of your, what we call our sixth sense, our intuit, instead of your intuition being suppressed, imagine it was your sight that was suppressed. Imagine that from the time you could talk and understand, humans, adults, told you, you have to navigate life with your eyes closed. And imagine if you said, but why? Why do I have to close my eyes? I can see all this stuff, it’s so cool, everything I can see.

50:47 And imagine if the adult said, no, that’s your imagination. If you want to be realistic, if you want to be able to get along in the world and get along with everyone else and navigate the world just like everyone else, you have to close your eyes. So then imagine you started closing your eyes, and as you close your eyes you went through school and everybody at school, even all the teachers, everybody had their eyes closed. You got a job as somebody with their eyes closed.

51:16 Now imagine the kind of world that would be developed if everybody had their eyes closed. All our technology, our inventions, they would be geared towards helping us navigate the world with our eyes closed because we don’t know that actually we can see. Does that make sense? So all our education, everything would be geared towards that. Now imagine if somebody suddenly opened their eyes and they said, but I don’t need all this, I can see, I have eyes, you have eyes too.

51:49 People would say, no, you’re crazy. That person would be a threat because it would be a threat to all the technology that’s being developed, the technology that’s bringing in income and jobs for people. So that person would be forced to close their eyes again in order to integrate into the world. So now let’s reverse, let’s change that up and imagine if instead of sight you are born with six senses and one of your senses, your intuition, that’s the one that’s been suppressed, that’s the one that you’ve been told is your imagination as you grow up.

52:30 And so as we grow up we develop technology to help us, you know, we develop smartphones or we develop earlier and earlier detection, medical equipment for medicine, but actually we have that ability within us to detect illnesses within our own body, we don’t need machines, but it’s been suppressed within us. We’re born with this, animals have it, babies have it, we all have this. But you see, and the thing is, if you imagine that you never had sight or your eyes were closed, you would not know what colors are, you would not have words even if you opened your eyes and you could see colors, there would be no words developed to describe them because nobody has assigned words to them, because technically they don’t exist, it’s our imagination.

53:26 Right, if we had not been suppressed from using our intuition from the time that we were born, we would have assigned words, we would have as many words to describe all the different nuances of levels of intuition, the gradients of feelings we have, whether we are full-blown psychics or intuits or clairvoyance or who can see in the future or who can feel the energies of what’s going on, or am I someone that can feel whether you have an illness coming on, or am I someone who can just feel my own illness, you know, like there’s different gradients, just like there are as many different colors that exist in the world, we would have assigned words to all these things. But today when someone feels these things they can’t describe them because we haven’t assigned words to them, and so when we do feel these things we don’t have the tools of language to describe it, and number two is that we are the ones that are made to feel that it’s our imagination, and it goes against the medical paradigm, which is a force to be reckoned with, you know, when we say that, but I know how to detect illnesses, I know how energy affects our physical bodies, but it goes against everything that the direction in which we have gone in developing our paradigm.

55:02 Okay, so we need to be in touch with our intuition too, and to honor it as a real thing, as a real people. I know that scientific community doesn’t recognize it. Exactly. That it has all sorts of things, it can draw energy, it can have negative energy, it can do all of these things. Yes, but so the way that I describe it to people is first of all, all of us are connected.

55:25 You know, that’s why your pet can tell when you’re about to come home. I mean, I have so many stories about animals or babies or children. I myself as a child was able to see things and tell things. So first of all we’re all connected, but we have been brought up to believe that we’re all separate, separate individual beings, and so we live in a world where we compete with each other, we live in a world where it’s about conquer or be conquered, kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.

55:59 In actuality what happens to me affects you because we’re all connected. It’s like fingers of a hand, if you hurt one finger the whole hand hurts. We’re not individual fingers, we’re all connected by the palm of the hand. How come that’s such a hard message for most people to understand, you know? Yeah, because you know the guests I have on this show and need to, like you, that have been around, that are evolved, that have seen a lot of things, they come back to the same conclusion: we are all one, and that when you hurt someone else you’re hurting yourself, and that we’re all responsible for each other in some way.

56:35 Yes, and yet that is not taught. That is not taught. And here’s how I see it, and here’s how I saw it during my near-death experience. It’s like a web, an invisible web which you can intuit, but you can’t see it with your physical eyes, but you can intuit, and that’s the sense that we have pretty much switched off just to be able to fit in into the world. So imagine you’re connected by a web, all of us, like there’s an invisible and instead of actual string let’s say it’s just energy, every single person on the planet is connected.

57:18 But here’s the thing, one of the reasons why, one of my key messages is that you have to love and honor yourself. You really have to love and honor yourself. You know why? Because when you love yourself, that’s what you’re bringing to the web, that’s what you’re bringing to everyone else. But when you so where I say that everything I learned was the opposite, the other way around, which is what I talk about in my book What If This Is Heaven, it’s about how everything we’ve taught is the opposite, it’s the wrong way around of how we really need to live in order to actually have a happy, healthy life and a healthy world.

57:58 We’ve been taught that it’s selfish to love ourselves, but we have to give and be charitable to other people. Here’s the thing, if you don’t love and honor yourself, just like the way I was, and I felt I had to give and give and give to my friend, I became depleted and empty and drained, that’s what I was bringing to the world, to the web. We take ourselves wherever we go and we bring who we are, so if you are empty, if you are needy that cancer came to save my life so that I would start taking care of myself, but what I was doing to myself is what I was bringing to the whole.

58:42 We have an obligation to bring a happy, healthy person to the whole, just like you have an obligation to bring a happy, healthy dad to your children. We have to do that for the whole web. I remember after our first episode I was talking about you two friends and I said, Anita says that, you know, every day when you get up in the morning you have to love yourself, and when you go out to the world it’s almost like, if you don’t do that, it’s like not taking a shower and not brushing your teeth, because you bring this negative energy or this bad smell or something that’s off, and then the energy goes to everyone else.

59:14 But if you love yourself and you walk out of that door with all of that wonderful energy, it rubs off on everyone else, and that’s what goes in the web. Yes, that’s what goes in the web that connects all of us. That’s what we want to bring in. And so after you got out of that hospital, this is what you started thinking about and doing with yourself. Yes.

59:33 And this is what you started writing about and telling other people. Yes. And I realized that not everybody is open to that. So when I got out of the hospital I was euphoric. I was like, oh my god, why didn’t we know this?

59:47 Why do we have to die to learn this? I mean, people die and they don’t come back, so what a waste of learning it on the other side. But I started to realize we’re born knowing this. Your children know this, but it gets conditioned out of us because we have to fit in. We’ve created a world for five sensory beings, and in order to fit in we suppressed that sixth sense, that intuition.

1:00:12 And so that’s when I realized that. So I wanted to shout it out from the rooftops because I thought it would help people, but I got resistance. Of course there were people that were happy to hear it, but there was also a lot of resistance from people who are very invested in living in a five sensory world. Okay, and what, how do you feel about cancer? Is cancer bad?

1:00:38 Is all cancer brought on by people and their energy levels? And is, and is, is Western medicine never a solution? I know there’s three questions there, but how, how do you feel about cancer, and then the diagnoses are that it happens to people? Okay, so now I want to say that people who have succumbed to cancer, who have passed on, they haven’t failed, they haven’t lost the battle. I don’t like the language of our culture that call cancer a battle, because you don’t battle your own body, and so they have not failed.

1:01:14 If it was their time, we all have to die sometime, and if cancer is the way we go, that’s the way we go. There has to be a way for us to go. So that’s, so I want to say that first. Now generally in terms of illnesses, cancers, chronic illnesses and things like that, I would say that if you, again, I want to use our imagination a little bit. Now imagine if your sixth sense, your intuition, was really highly tuned, and imagine if you could actually see energy.

1:01:53 If you could see energy, if somebody was really happy and living their purpose, you would be able to see their aura and it would be really huge. If somebody is really sad, if they have been a victim their whole life, if they’ve been abused and they feel really small and they are a people pleaser and a doormat, their energy will be really small. Now even if you can’t see it, I’m sure you notice when people walk in a room, into a room, what energy they bring with them.

1:02:27 But now imagine, as I said, if you could see it. Now imagine though, you see, you follow someone, or imagine if you could see your own energy and as you go through the day, imagine if you could see what uplifts your energy and what lowers your energy. So let’s say you’re being chastised by someone and you see your own energy going down, or you are you’re playing with your children and your energy just swells right up, it’s so huge that it encompasses your children and it energizes them as well, because the thing is, the thing about having big energy is that it energizes other people as well.

1:03:10 So the reason I say this is because if somebody is in that state where their energy is very strong all the time, they are far less likely to get ill, far less likely than someone whose energy is down and tight and close. So now instead of constantly, our, instead of our medical paradigm spending billions, trillions of dollars on technology for earlier and earlier detection of cancer cells, what if they developed technology that actually measured our energy levels, but measured it to give it some sense, so that it assigns different colors maybe for different emotions, so that we can actually see what emotions are causing our energy to go up and to go down, and if we had that kind of information, information like, oh my gosh, I’ve been feeling lonely, this is what happens, the loneliness has been depleting me.

1:04:17 Imagine if we could see it, identify it, those are the things that will really heal our bodies. Okay, so we need to be aware of all this energy, stay away from the negative stuff and go into the positive in order to keep us in these healthy states. Yes, but the reason why I don’t keep it as simple as saying negative and positive is because sometimes what’s negative for one person is positive for another, or vice versa, what’s positive for one is negative for another.

1:04:46 But it is about being aware of things like, am I feeling lonely? Do I have people in my life who love me? Do I have people in my life who I love? Does my life have purpose? What is it?

1:04:59 What are the things I do that uplift my energy? What are the things I do that that deplete my energy? And very often with people like, people pleasers, doormats, they have trouble saying no, and every time they say yes when they want to say no, it depletes their energy. And empaths, people who feel the energy of other people, they also have to be aware that, I do this, I absorb the energy of other people. I understand now why I hated hospitals, you see.

1:05:32 And if we could measure energy we may realize that for some people a hospital may not be the best place for us, it’s actually depleting our energy instead of increasing it. But for real health you need to be in a state of having a high level of energy for a prolonged period of time and feeding your body good nutritious food, and you will see yourself coming back to full health. And is all cancer a result of this low energy state? I don’t want to make a blanket statement, I’m cautious about doing that.

1:06:10 I certainly know it is the case for me, and I also know it’s the case for a lot of people who have written to me. And I have received letters from tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who’ve said they relate to what I say and relate to everything that I continue to say. I mean, my wife Mariana has been to one of your events and she said they’re extremely powerful, and there’s obviously a lot of cancer victims there, people that are suffering, not victims, we’re not gonna use that word, but people who have this state in them.

1:06:40 You must get asked all the time or hear stories, or Anita, what do I do, or do I do this? I mean, it’s a lot of pressure to put on you. What do you tell people? So what I do is, of course it breaks my heart that I can’t help people individually, so I put out videos every week, YouTube videos, targeted for people who are going through illnesses and giving them, telling them how to tune in to their energy, how to tune in, and also I tell people that, you know, that if people are, I tell them not to treat their cancer as an enemy.

1:07:25 It’s not a battle to be won or lost, it’s their, it’s a symptom from their body trying to heal them. Every, what we call illness, against something that we do the opposite. You know, it’s like when you have an infection in your body, your body develops a fever to fight the infection, but we see the fever as the illness and we fight the fever. But so cancer is the same, the cancer is actually there to try and heal you from something else. Our bodies are actually much smarter than we think they are.

1:07:58 So I create these videos so that people can just tune in, and I tell them things like what to tune into, ask, I tell them what questions to ask themselves, I tell them how to tune in into their own energy levels, how to talk to their bodies, how to communicate with their bodies, things like that. Okay. NDEs, near-death experiences. I had never heard that acronym until I had you on the show about three and a half years ago, and so you know, there are these experiences people have, they’re very different for different people.

1:08:32 Yours was out of body, you got a lot of realizations. You know, some people say the end of life, you know, you have DMT that goes into your brain, but what I do know is that a few months ago I went down to Costa Rica and I had some ayahuasca experiences, and you know, when I have these psychoactive substances in my brain, I tend to get similar messages that you describe with your near-death experience. I get told truisms that now seem so obvious. I get told that I’m connected to everyone around me.

1:09:01 I get told these greater things that maybe if I was more of an empath or connected with more of my intuition it would be obvious, but maybe because I’ve shut it down it’s so open to me. Have you thought about those things that people ask you about, the links between near-death experiences and psychedelics, and what are your thoughts on all of that? Yeah, people ask me that all the time, and also, so actually a group of people flew me down to Costa Rica because they wanted me to try it, they wanted me to try it so that I could give them a first-hand comparison.

1:09:35 Okay. It was an amazing experience, I tried the ayahuasca and it was an amazing experience. However, it fades. The NDE doesn’t fade, there’s a big difference. And I noticed that the people who have the ayahuasca, they, this is not to knock it, I know it helps a lot of people, I think it’s great, I love what the people are doing, it’s in a controlled environment, it’s very responsible.

1:10:04 This is not to knock it at all, it’s just the difference between a near-death experience. When people say that it’s just the chemicals in your brain, it’s more than that, it changes you, it gives you a full reboot, it’s like a clean slate to start again. A full reboot. And with the ayahuasca what happens is it’s a great experience, but then you have to go back and live the life you used to live, so unless you can use that to really live out those insights that you got, what you’ll find is that in six months or a year you’ll need another top up.

1:10:48 I found that after the NDE I don’t feel I need another experience again, it’s changed my life so much that even after the ayahuasca, I did it just as a comparison, I don’t need to go back and do it again. That’s really interesting, Anita. So our next movie is called Dissolution, and it’s called Beyond the Ego, and we’re looking at different ways that we can test what’s known as our egoic mind and see if that’s some of the problems that we have with ourself, with the world, and I would agree with you.

1:11:18 I had these experiences, I saw a lot of these visions, but when you come back into this world, and maybe it’s based on a five-sense world or based on these things we’ve been taught, that stuff, it does fade. And I find that you can do different things as a human to kind of connect you to the web maybe of people, but sometimes those things do fade as well, and so it’s this maybe constant journey to try to find out what is right or what you’re really feeling, that us humans are trying, always trying to find these things, but you know, these things did fade for me, and so I’m trying to remember the ones that are important, I’m trying to get there. Unfortunately I don’t know how to simulate the near-death experience.

1:11:55 I did that to myself, I had a self-induced near-death experience in 2001, but that was my overdose, which you know we’ve now made into a movie called Iron Mind, and I actually took back a lot of that darkness and it’s become light, a lot of the way you did. But it’s an interesting thing you say about the NDE. But I guess not everyone can have one of those, right? No, no, they can’t, and I mean I wouldn’t recommend it, put it that way. I wouldn’t recommend they go through what I went through.

1:12:26 What I realized when I came back from the NDE that the life I had been living up to that point was not my life. And you see, that’s the thing, I realized that I could not go back and be the person that I was before. I just could not, because if I went back to being that person I would have had the cancer all over again. And that, and if that kind of realization can hit you from plant medicine, that’s really what you’re looking for. That’s really the kind of insight where you’re willing to leave it all behind and start afresh, and not everybody can do that, and also I don’t recommend everyone do that because you may have built a life with family, with children, and you don’t want to hurt them, but you may find out from an experience like that that, oh my gosh, I built this life from a place of fear, not from a place of love.

1:13:28 Yeah, I think a lot of people watching us are in those situations, you know, and they sometimes you don’t know that you’re in it, like you said, you don’t know you’re living in fear, this just seems like a normal life. Yes, to be constantly worried about this and stressed about this and pleasing other people. How do you tell people to use your information, like how do you tell people to look at their lives and to try to use what you’ve brought back? Let’s see if I can, in your latest book as well, Heaven on Earth, I mean, is that something that you try to look around?

1:14:02 And yes, in fact, I’m writing a third book at the moment. What’s it about? Okay, so the third book is called Sensitive Is the New Strong, and in this book I actually speak about how our sensitivity, our intuition, sensitivity, it’s all one, how it has been suppressed for all of us, and I talk about why this world is, why we’re in such a mess, all of us, and it is because we have suppressed our sensitivity and our intuition, and we have judged sensitivity and intuition as being a weakness instead of embracing it as a strength, and so we may actually even be on the brink of our own extinction as a human species, and maybe in order to take human evolution to the next level we may have to embrace sensitivity as a strength and as a key strength to take us to this next level of human evolution.

1:15:05 And maybe this is extra important for us guys as well, and we were brought up in a world where it’s not okay to be sensitive. Yeah, it’s really important for guys for a couple of reasons, the main one being that sensitive guys are afraid of expressing their sensitivity because in fact guys have it harder than women do. Guys are the ones that are ostracized if they’re super sensitive, guys are the ones that are being told, man up. But in fact we have to stop doing that, we have to actually we actually have to reward guys who are sensitive and actually make them feel that we live in a world where it’s safe to be sensitive, not only safe but it’s actually seen as a strength, as something that’s desirable, whereas we’ve always judged it as a weakness.

1:15:54 We’ve believed that human evolution is based on survival of the fittest and we’ve described the fittest as being the strongest, the one who’s most able to conquer, you know, it’s this whole thing of conquer or be conquered, eat or be eaten, might is right. But maybe we have to rethink the parameters of what the fittest means. Maybe the fittest also has to be the most empathic and the most sensitive. And yet when I turn on the news, Anita, what do we see?

1:16:26 Displays of power and domination. What do you think about that? See, that is actually our downfall, that’s what I feel. I feel that is what will take us to the brink of our own destruction. So be sensitive but don’t be the doormat, because that is, because then when you’re an empathic person, that is kind of where you were, right?

1:16:48 Yes, you didn’t have any. What does that mean? So let me tell you a little bit about what to me being a doormat is. We live in a world where people who are empathic, who are intuitive, are treated like they’re weak, not like they’re strong, and because we struggle to try and fit in, we try and fit in because we have this extra sense which we don’t know what to do with because there’s no words to describe it, we haven’t been given a language for it because it’s dismissed.

1:17:24 So we are working our way through the world with this sixth sense but it’s not recognized, it’s seen as a weakness. This is why we’re always kind of the victim and this is why we end up being the doormats and the people pleasers, because I can see now looking back, I was bullied as a child at school, but I can almost see how I was set up to be the victim and to be bullied because when you’re an empath, what happens when you’re an empath is that you can feel what other people around you are feeling. When you can feel what other people around you are feeling, you need those people to feel good in order for you to feel good, and so you go out of your way to make those people feel good, thinking if I keep making them feel good I will feel good, because I can feel their energy.

1:18:19 But what ends up happening is, what if those people are really needy and really bottomless because they haven’t been taught that you have to, it’s okay to take care of yourself, you have to take care of yourself because this is what you’re bringing to the whole, to the web. So they haven’t been taught that, but they’re quite welcoming of somebody giving and giving to them, and what happens is the empath is always the one that’s giving and giving because we need the people around us to feel good. Does that kind of make sense?

1:18:51 And that’s what makes empaths more prone to becoming doormats and people-pleasers. Okay, and money comes into play as well, right? Because people kind of have that weird relationship with money and that can also take them down. Money has, yeah, it’s, it’s a really, people do have a weird relationship with money, and it seems to be, money seems to be like such a sensitive topic, it sets people off, but we need to see money for what it is. One of the problems is that money has been given too much of a priority.

1:19:32 In other words, we use money to measure everything. So imagine if we changed our parameters, we measure success with money, we measure, like, money is prioritized over and above our health because people sacrifice their health for money. But imagine if we change that, imagine if we go back to being able to see our energy, imagine if we had devices that could measure our energy, imagine if energy, the amount of energy we have, was actually a more important commodity than money, and if the, imagine if the measure of our success was how much energy we had, because when you have the energy the money will come.

1:20:19 But what we do is we pursue money and we deplete our energy in the pursuit of money, and then we spend the money to get our health back. Yeah, I also have seen empath and doormats have a bad relationship with money. One of my students from my business accelerator program, he had had such a weird relationship with money, he was very empathetic, but he always felt bad charging for money, and so he always set up his businesses as these non-profit organizations, and it ended up ruining him financially.

1:20:49 Yes. Ruined one of his marriages. And when he came on my course I said, no, no, no, the money isn’t bad, the money actually allows you to help more people. Exactly. Once he made that switch everything changed and he became more successful.

1:21:02 It’s because he was kind of loving himself first. Yes. Via that money. I’m sure, I know you’ve talked about this before, you’ve seen that in people, right? Yes, 100%.

1:21:11 I’ve seen it in people, and I say the same thing, I actually tell my audience, I actually say to them, if you are an empath, I want you to make money. I would rather empaths have a lot of money because I know they’re going to use it for the good of the world, because if you don’t make money, if you don’t allow that money to come to you, if you don’t allow it, it’s not going to, you getting money or not getting money is not going to stop the people who make money for the sake of money, they’re going to continue to do that anyway. But if you want to change the world, if we really want to change the world, we need to encourage empaths to make money and we need to tell them that it’s okay to make money, and in fact it’s good for the world if you as an empath make money.

1:21:57 Yeah, love yourself, have your financial freedom. Yeah, and go out in the world with all that great energy. Yeah, and I truly believe that empaths, the more money they have, the more good in the world they do. Another thing about empaths is you said for most empaths that the normal spirituality path doesn’t work because a lot of times they’re encouraged to reduce their ego. Can you speak on that?

1:22:19 Because sometimes they need to embrace that part of themselves. Exactly. So if you’re an empath that has succumbed to becoming a people pleaser and a doormat, you know, because you’re trying to make everyone around you feel good and you’re afraid of charging money, there is this danger that you will fall into this whole, you know, serving other people. I often feel that even cult leaders attract a lot of empaths who’ve become doormats, because people feel that the doormats, the empaths, feel that they are in service to a greater purpose.

1:23:01 I actually feel empaths need to be encouraged to embrace their ego. The same values don’t apply to everyone. These messages about being of service, about giving, about relinquishing the ego, I actually don’t believe they apply to empaths. They apply to people who are not in touch with their intuition, their sixth sense, who believe we live in a dog-eat-dog world, who believe we live in a world where we have to conquer or we will be conquered. Those spiritual messages need to go to those people, but those are not the people who are attracted to those messages, they’re not the ones sitting in the spiritual classes.

1:23:48 It’s the empaths who are, and it’s the empaths who are getting those messages, and that’s why our world is so imbalanced, because the empaths are becoming more service oriented, because spiritual teachings tell us money is bad, money is evil, don’t make money. Empaths become poorer, they struggle with money, they get guilty, they and they slash their egos, they make themselves small to the point of being invisible. That was me. I’m not judging people, that was exactly who I was.

1:24:22 I was attracted to all those spiritual teachings and they made me invisible. Those spiritual teachings were not for me. And so now instead you choose to, I choose to empower empaths because the world needs more of them. I choose to empower sensitive people. We need more of it, not less.

1:24:43 We really need more, we need more of that sensitive energy, intuitive energy, we need people who will do good for the world, we need people like that to make money and to have more money, otherwise they’re sitting in poverty struggling with money while those who are in power are not really doing what’s best for the web, for the whole, for all of us. That should be your next book after this one, money. Yeah. Anita Moorjani, he talks about money. What does that word mean to you?

1:25:12 Ego. What does that mean to me? It’s often misunderstood. It has a lot of different meanings, means different things to different people. I believe it’s important to define the word before talking about it, so we probably should have defined it before we before I even touched on it earlier, but to me the word ego means it means the part of you that you present to the world.

1:25:40 It’s your face, it’s your front, it’s the part of you that differentiates you from other people. So as I said, we’re all connected, we’re all connect, part of the web, but your ego is what makes you unique from the next person. And if we diminish that ego, which is what I used to do, because I used to believe that the ego is negative, the ego prevents us from being spiritual, when so I used to diminish the ego, but that made me invisible, it made me small, it made me more of a doormat.

1:26:17 And so I tell people who are sensitive, intuitive, empathic, you need to embrace the ego so that you can go out there into the world and share your gifts with the world. When you diminish your ego, when it’s too small, when you make yourself invisible, you don’t share your gifts with the world because you feel you are worthless. That’s what I felt. Amen to that. Tell me about you, Anita, how, what do you do as a daily practice to make sure that you have all this energy to do all this?

1:26:46 I know you’re traveling all around the world, writing books, and I know people want a lot of your time and ask answers, but do you have daily practices that are just something you always do? There are a few things. One thing is I do try and get as much sleep as I can, that’s really, sleep to me is really important. The right nutrition is important. I don’t speak a lot about nutrition because I truly believe that everybody needs to listen to their own body, and one of the things about nutrition that threw me off is I used to follow what was on the internet and I thought that was gospel, but I realized that no one thing is is true for everybody, so listen to your body.

1:27:30 So I do listen to my body when it comes to nutrition. So sleep and the right nutrition for me are the two key things, but also other things like, I love to listen to music, love it, music really uplifts me, and this one sounds a bit crazy but I do love to binge watch drama serials. Which ones? The Good Wife. Okay, all right, that’s good.

1:27:57 Anything, Ozark is really good. Oh, is it? Okay, I’ve got to check that out. What if I asked your husband and some of your friends if I said, what is Anita’s superpower, how is she able to do all this stuff, what would they tell me? Because it’s one thing to have your NDE and have your realization, but to then go and write a book and to then go and talk around the world, I mean, you know, you have to have something to be able to deliver this message.

1:28:22 What would they tell me is your superpower, how are you able to do this stuff? Wow, that’s a good question. Give me an example of what you mean. What I mean, do you have a, I mean, do you have a way of organizing yourself to make sure you do all these things? Is it a deeper inner calling from that original NDE, why you continue to do this?

1:28:42 Because you know you must sometimes want to take a break for a year or two. No, yes, I do. I go through phases of wanting to take a break, but it’s a deep calling and I feel guided, and this is where this is where I hesitate, often hesitate, but I’m gonna share it. I do hear voices telling me what to do, what to do next, and when those voices come, and they come frequently, that passion is reignited. Okay.

1:29:13 And it is a deep calling and I feel that the souls that I encountered when I was in the NDE, they haven’t left me. Your father, your best friend, were there other people there? There were others. People you knew or not necessarily? I didn’t know them from this life.

1:29:34 Okay. And I feel that they have guided me and they and they’ve not let me down, they’ve not let me down this far. Okay, and so they can, they’ll talk to you daily, weekly? Daily. Okay, and just be like, okay, we gotta, we gotta step it up, or we gotta, we got to go do this.

1:29:52 Yeah, they’ll tell me exactly, they’ll actually, more often than not they tell me to step aside. They say, oh, don’t try so hard, no, let this go, let it go, let it go. And I mean, and I’ll give you an actual example. Last year, last year I was, so I’ve been living in the U.S. and I’ve been there on a work visa, it’s called an O visa, which was sponsored by my publishers, which was because of Wayne Dyer, because he discovered my story and he asked them to sponsor my visa, and it was coming up to expiration, and so I went back to my publishers and asked if they would sponsor it again, and at first they said yes, absolutely.

1:30:38 Now remember, Wayne Dyer is not alive anymore. Yeah, I know. And so I said to them, oh, and that’s another voice I hear, by the way, it’s Wayne’s. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Yes.

1:30:48 So I said to them, you know, would you sponsor it again, and at first they said yes, absolutely we will, but then when they got the forms and everything from my immigration lawyer, they came back to me and they said, we won’t be able to sponsor you because it says here that we need to have ongoing contracts with you and we don’t have anything with you for the future. And I thought, oh yeah, they’re right. So I said, what if I have an upcoming book? And they said, all right, pass it to our, you know, our chief editor.

1:31:28 So now I want to say here that my publishers were going through tremendous changes because Wayne had passed. When I showed them an outline of the book they actually passed on it, so I had no one to sponsor me for a visa and I thought, oh okay, we’ve come to an end of the road, I’m going to have to leave the US. At the same time I was involved with a different film company for the movie and they were not treating me very well and I was struggling, I was in two minds whether to hold on to them or not, and so I had these two things, the book deal was falling through, the film deal which I didn’t feel comfortable, they wanted it but I didn’t want to go through with it, and I thought, if I don’t have either of these deals I have no visa to live in America, we’ll have to pack up and leave.

1:32:27 No part of me wanted to leave, I love where I’m living, I love the part of California I’m living, I love the life I’ve created. I was trying really hard to hold on to everything, trying really hard to hold on, like working on a book manuscript that they would accept, working on the movie deal. What happened is the voices were telling me, let go, we’ve never let you down before, let go, let go, let go. So I did, I let go. We packed up, I literally said to Danny, looks like we’re leaving, let’s just give it all up, pack it up.

1:33:03 If this is as far as I’ve come in this work I’ve still done a great job, you know, it’s better than I ever imagined, let’s pack it up and let’s go and retire. Literally that’s what I thought, I thought I’d hit the end of the road. We let go of everything, we started to look around, we came to England, we thought, I wonder if we want to live in England, do we want to go back to Hong Kong? We were literally talking to people, figuring out where are we going to live.

1:33:32 In that time what happened is I got connected to a literary agent who said to me, have you never had an agent? And I said no. She said, you need one now that Wayne is gone, you need one, I’ll help you. And I thought, wow, okay, this is great. The literary agent, I gave her the manuscript and she gave it to five different publishers.

1:33:56 It got picked up by Simon Schuster, so my next book is with Simon Schuster. And then with the movie deal, the minute I walked away from that movie deal I got an offer from someone else that was way better than anything I could have had, and they said that they had been wanting to make me this offer for a long time but because I was tied up with the other one they hadn’t come forward. Okay, that’s crazy. So by letting it go and trusting the voices, by letting it go, something better came to me than could have come had I been trying to hold on to what I was, had, you see what I mean?

1:34:36 I was holding on to what I thought was mine. When I let it go something better came, way better. And so now instead of me trying to hold on to people feeling they will be doing me a favor by keeping me on, I’ve got a movie company and a book publisher both of whom feel very happy that I said yes to them. Okay, and they’ve sponsored my visas. This is a good lesson, and the voices are with you?

1:35:05 The voices are with me all the time. What would you say was the best day of your life and the worst day of your life? Gosh, interesting. There are so many best days. That’s a good answer.

1:35:19 Yeah, there’s so many. I know that the days, those days when I came out of the coma were amazing, they were just it was so magical, the world looked so beautiful, that connection with everyone was so strong, it felt so good. Those were some of the best days of my life, days spent with Danny, my husband, I just love being with him. Days when Wayne Dyer discovered my story, oh my god, that was amazing, that was, I cried when I got an email from Hay House saying Wayne Dyer had discovered my story.

1:35:58 So yeah, quite a few best days. Worst day in recent times? Gosh, that’s a tough one. Have you had a worse day? You must have.

1:36:14 So I mean this is not even major, that’s the problem, but maybe that’s not a problem, maybe it’s a blessing, Danny got sick recently, thank god it’s nothing serious, but for a moment I thought it was, and so for those moments it was the worst, it was really the worst. I thought it was more serious than it was, it turned out to be okay. What would happen if someone you were close to got cancer? How would you feel and what would you tell them? I would support them in the way they would want to be supported.

1:36:47 I would make sure that I bring my best self to them because we affect the people around us. I would want to uplift their energy, not bring it down. These are the things I would do. But of course there would be a part of me that would be scared that they are scared, and I would want them to be able to handle it. I would, there would be a part of me that would really want them to not let it get them down.

1:37:22 I wish that cancer was seen differently in our paradigm, in our culture. I actually think that our medical paradigm, I actually think the fear of cancer is worse than the cancer itself, and I actually think that fear makes it worse, it feeds the cancer. That fear energy actually makes the cancer worse than it is, and so when we fear the cancer, and then if we realize the fear is what’s feeding the cancer, we then fear the fear, so that’s the whole cycle.

1:38:02 That’s the cycle I worry about. How do you feel about cancer charities? I don’t support them because I think we have too much cancer awareness. I move away from talking about cancer, I only talk, this is why, when people ask me about cancer I talk about raising our energy, raising our awareness, raising our health levels. You know, people talk about donating money for cancer awareness.

1:38:34 I think we have too much cancer awareness, we need to have health awareness, well-being awareness, joy awareness, life awareness, high energy awareness. We don’t have enough of any of those things, we have way too much energy spent on cancer awareness. I agree. What scares you? Losing someone I love, even though I know that they’re fine, even though I know that they will send me signs and communicate with me, but me being here in the physical and losing someone who’s very close to me, that scares me, that’s my biggest fear.

1:39:17 And I have a handful of people I’m very close to, Danny being one of them, I’m very close to my family, my mom, my brother, and they are so supportive of me and what I do. So yeah, losing any of them, although I know that my mom, she’s 91, I know she will have to go and I’m prepared for that, but if I were to lose my husband or my brother, that would really affect me. Take me forward to 20 30, you know, 11, 12 years from now, what is a day in the life of Anita?

1:39:54 What are you doing then? What do you want to be doing with your life? I think I will be ready for it to be quieter and calmer. I would like to travel less. I hope we’ve discovered teleportation by then so I don’t have to ride in planes and sit at airports.

1:40:10 You do a lot of that. I do a lot of that, that’s what I don’t like. I love being in the different countries, I love speaking at events, but I don’t like airports. And I don’t even mind being in the plane, I kind of cocoon myself and do my own thing, but it’s airports. I don’t like airports.

1:40:29 So I got energy, that’s why. One level below hospital energy is airport energy, right? Yes, exactly. Okay, all right. So still, but you still maybe you want to be speaking?

1:40:40 I am, but maybe less busy, less busy. I like writing. I would really love to be involved in some kind of healing or energy work, in actually helping people get well. But by 2030 I think our paradigm will have changed a lot, I think we will be viewing cancer very differently at that point. I’m hoping that we will be looking at the way we treat cancer today as being archaic.

1:41:12 I really do think that, and so, and I hope to be involved with the progress of that, I would love to be involved with that in some way. Okay, what keeps you awake at night? Those voices. Do you actually hear them? They sometimes wake me up at two in the morning with an important message, it might even be something to write in my book, you know, or my next Facebook Live, what to talk about, it’ll be things like that.

1:41:38 Wow, that’s like, I guess that’s a great gift and a great burden, right? It’s both. Yes. Wow. Anita, I always ask everyone here at the end a few questions I want to ask you.

1:41:49 If you could pick up a magic phone and call the 20 year old Anita Moorjani, that maybe the girl that just wanted to have fun, although she maybe was in her teens then, I don’t know, but if you could give her some advice based on everything you’ve been through, what would you tell her? I would tell her, don’t take life so seriously. I would tell her to love herself more, much more. Love yourself like your life depends on it, because it does. She didn’t know then that her life depended on her loving herself.

1:42:19 And I would tell her, don’t be afraid to be who you are, be authentic, let the world know who you are, and have fun, and eat chocolate. Love yourself like your life depended on it, because it does. Yes, it’s powerful, Anita. Second part of that question, best advice you’ve ever received throughout your life, and that could come from a living person or an entity or anything, but what is someone that someone told you that you remember? I remember, okay, so I used to get really, really badly affected by critics and I was afraid of sharing my message because of critics, and that’s what would keep me quiet until I discovered Wayne Dyer, until Wayne Dyer discovered my story, and I told him that I’m afraid to share it in such a big way because it attracts, the more you share it the more you attract critics.

1:43:17 And he actually taught me, he said something to me, something to the effect of, if you don’t have critics it means your message is not stirring anyone, it means your message is same old, same old. The fact that you have critics, it means people are feeling threatened because you’ve said something different that is meaningful, that is hitting people. I always say to myself, criticism is a sign of success, I want more. Yeah, and so you’re very right with that, good advice.

1:43:52 That Wayne, very, very, very amazing man, right? Yeah, oh gosh, yes, I wouldn’t be doing here, doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t for him. Yeah, what was he like? Oh, he was generous, extremely generous, very generous soul, very big hearted. He would stop and give homeless people money, like 50 dollar bills in the U.S.

1:44:17 I toured with him for four years, we went to Australia, we went to England, here, Scotland, and all over the US and Hawaii, Maui, and he was, gosh, he was, you know, when he passed away in 2015 it was like a whole different world, I had to learn all over again, because he discovered my story in 2011 and launched me in 2012, and he was like this buffer between me and the world, and he took care of his people, took care of everything, my speaking engagements and everything, and then all of a sudden he was gone, and when, and again when he was gone that was when I realized how much he had done for me. And he was really quite something, he was the guy that would stand on stage and tell people, if you buy just one book today, buy this one, and he would be holding up my book, not his book but mine.

1:45:23 That’s powerful. Yeah, it’s really powerful, I’m so glad he did that. So the last part of that question is to that 20 year old that’s out there watching us right now, what advice do you give to them? Because like you said, when you’re, it’s like a fish in water, sometimes you don’t know you’re in this fear, in this anxiety-ridden state that you’ve put yourself in, you think that’s normal. And what advice do you give to them about how they can make that change in their life?

1:45:48 I would say to them that, ask yourself, when you make any decision in your life, are you making this decision from a place of fear or from a place of love? Follow your heart, follow your passion, do things you do out of love, not out of a place of fear. Incredible words of wisdom, Anita. I started this show because I was in a place that I didn’t love.

1:46:38 I was a banker, and again I was making the decisions based on my five senses in the current world paradigm, which was more money meant more happiness and success, and it was killing me, it was slowly killing me, it really was. I didn’t have cancer yet, but I was, you know, depressed and drinking myself, you know, to death, and it wasn’t until I started following my heart that everything changed for me, all the energy. I get to meet amazing people like you.

1:47:04 So I can second everything you’re saying here, and I think I think like you told me the last time you were here, you know, before you step out of that door in the morning, love yourself, you know, and because every interaction with everyone else is going to be based, and if you really love yourself, it’s going to be this amazing energy you’re putting out in the world, and you kind of, you have a duty to love yourself every day, don’t you? Yes, exactly. I love that you do, you, that is your duty.

1:47:32 It is to love yourself, because that’s what you bring into the web when you love yourself, and that’s what you’re putting out into the world. And I want to say one more thing, both of us are by nature probably introverted people, and so you know, I know you work hard to get out there and give that message because you know it’s this higher calling for you, so I just want to say I really appreciate you getting out of your comfort zone and doing all this stuff and traveling and spreading the message. I know people are really affected by you, so thank you so much, Anita, for coming on.

1:48:01 Thanks for coming on almost four years ago, and yeah, just looking forward to seeing the next book, your money book as well, and your movie as well. I think it’s going to be absolutely incredible, so thank you so much, it’s been a huge pleasure. Wow, thank you, and thank you for what you do, it’s amazing and it helps the world, so thank you. All right, it’s my pleasure.