Know Thyself - E90 - Anita Moorjani: Woman in Coma Nearly Dies and Discovers the Purpose Behind Her Pain

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

In 2006, after a long battle with cancer, Anita Moorjani went into a coma, her doctor told her family that she had only a few hours left to live. During the 30 hours she spent in the coma, she had a profound near-death-experience where she was told the purpose of her life. In this episode, André sits down with her for an in depth explanation of what went on and the insights she gained from the experience. They discuss the root of all disease (and how we can heal ourselves with this knowledge), Anita’s perception of God and our true essence, reincarnation and much more. Anita provides practical tools and knowledge to help you live your most authentic life today and experience a more vibrant way of being. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 1:26 Life Before Cancer  4:37 Facing Her Cancer Diagnosis  16:56 How Inauthenticity Leads to Illness 23:42 Is It Your Fault? Taking Responsibility for Disease  25:19 Facing Death & Going Into a Coma 28:36 Leaving Her Body & Awakening in the After-Life 35:28 What the 'Other Side' Is Like 41:30 The Moment My Purpose Was Revealed & Choosing to Come Back 47:27 Waking Up & Fully Recovering From Cancer 50:48 Sharing Her Experience with Others Afterwards 55:34 Reality of God & Our True Essence 59:08 What Happened After: Entering a New Way of Being 1:04:24 Actualizing Her Purpose Afterwards (Wayne Dyer, Book Deal, and Speaking) 1:11:15 Most Important Lessons I Learned in Death 1:16:23 How to 'Die' Before You Die 1:25:54 Truth About Time, Past Lives & Reincarnation 1:30:15 Secret to Overcoming Chronic Illnesses 1:32:58 Who You Are at Your True Essence 1:37:06 Making Choices from Love, Not Fear 1:39:50 Conclusion ___________ Anita Moorjani was born in Singapore of Indian parents, moved to Hong Kong at the age of two, and lived in Hong Kong until she moved to the United States in 2015. Anita worked in the corporate world for many years before being diagnosed with cancer in April 2002. Her fascinating and moving near-death experience (NDE) in early 2006 tremendously changed her perspective on life, and her work is now ingrained with the depths and insights she gained while in the other realm. She, and her miraculous story, were discovered by Dr Wayne Dyer who fostered her entrance into the world of public speaking, and urged her to write a book about her experience. And following his lead, Anita wrote her first book, Dying to be Me, and it reached the New York Times Best Seller list. Since then her two other books "What if this is Heaven" and "Sensitive is the New Strong" have reached significant acclaim. As a result of her NDE, Anita is often invited to speak at conferences and events around the globe to share her insights. From her Social Media channels to her live workshops, Anita demonstrates that she is the embodiment of the truth that we all have the inner power and wisdom to overcome even the most adverse situations. 'Dying to Be Me' Book: https://amzn.to/3HvGSTy Join Anita live ~ https://anitamoorjani.com/upcoming-events Join Anita online: https://amsanctuary.com ___________ Looking to Start a Podcast? Podcasting Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

Not everyone gets to experience death before they die. What an experience like that does is it changes your value system. Before the diagnosis, I never allowed my own voice to be heard, and I got diagnosed with cancer. I had tumors that were the size of golf balls, and that's when the doctors told my husband that these are my final hours. I went into a coma. I left my body and I understood why I had the illness. It's not a physical problem. It is much more than that.

You have to bring all these elements in if you truly want to heal. You need to create a life that you love and one that you want to live. Start saying no to the things that you don't want to do. And then start saying yes to the things you've always wanted to do. It's important to love yourself like your love. Life depends on it because it does. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to know thyself. Today we have the privilege of sitting down with somebody who is an author, a speaker, a teacher,

and somebody who had a near-death experience that fundamentally changed her life in the way that she moves through it. And now she shares her story and the insights that she's gleaned from it. Anita Marjani, thank you for being here. Thank you very much for inviting me. Yeah. What was your life like before the cancer diagnosis? and we'll dive into all the experience and nuance.

But I'm just curious for you to set the stage a little bit of what life was kind of like for you before the illness struck. So I lived in Hong Kong. I was married. I am married to my husband, Danny. And life, I would say it was almost ordinary. I lived a regular, ordinary life. I'm ethnically Indian.

But I grew up, I went to a British school, grew up in Hong Kong, which is a very, predominantly a Chinese city. So although I grew up very multicultural, I lived a life in Hong Kong. And one of the things I want to mention about the type of person I am and was definitely was more so, is that I've always been somebody who is a people-pleaser, very conflict avoidance, and lived a life where I used to be painfully shy, like very, very shy, very, I thought of myself. as quite introverted. And I was someone who also feared a lot of things because I grew up in a culture with Indian parents where they groomed me for an arranged marriage. But I ended up not going through with an arranged marriage. I ended up, in fact, running away from a wedding three days

before the wedding, which was a huge issue. But I was always being an Indian woman in my culture, I was always discouraged from being myself. In my culture, particularly during the time I grow up, it might have changed a little bit now, but from stories I hear, not all of the Indian culture has changed, but anyway, growing up, women were, we were more repressed than men. Our value was measured, or our worth was measured by how valuable we were to the men in our community. So a daughter was brought up to obey her father and live at home with her parents until she got married. And then she would be the responsibility of her husband. So a woman was never, ever encouraged to be independent. And so for this reason, I was discouraged from higher education or having a job or being independent,

whereas I was someone who really wanted to be independent. I wanted to get a job. I wanted to have earn my own money and so on. And I can get into more of that later and how it affected me in the near-death experience. But basically that was my life. But then I met this amazing man, Danny. And we were having an amazing life together. But I did get cancer, diagnosed with cancer in 2002, which was lymphoma. So what was it like the moment of the diagnosis? And if you can give a little bit of the nuance of what kind of cancer, how aggressive was it, what stage was it? So it was diagnosed at stage 2B lymphoma. 2B means it had spread.

So it started as a lump on this side of my neck. And stage 2B means it had spread to just a portion of my body. So it was in this quadrant of my body. And so the reaction, was very mixed when I was diagnosed. Going back to what I was saying that I was somebody who was a people pleaser, very non-confrontational, I was somebody who was always there to be of service to everyone around me, to help everyone around me. And I never allowed my own voice to be heard. and my best friend was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half before I was.

And I was devastated when she was diagnosed, and hers was an aggressive form of cancer. And I made myself available to support her through her journey. I literally put my life on hold because I was very close to her. She was like a sister to me. I knew her my entire life. We knew each other our entire lives. And I would feel so guilty if I was going out and having fun while she was sick in bed or in hospital or having cancer treatments. So I literally put my life on hold.

Even if I went shopping to buy myself clothes, I would feel really guilty trying on nice clothes thinking she's dying. Her life is ending and here I am having fun. I couldn't even go out for dinner with friends. who were mutual friends, but now she was too sick to come out with us. So I just put my life on hold, and even when I was really tired and depleted, I was there for her. Then when I got the diagnosis, and it was cancer, so first it was shock. But interestingly, the next feeling was, ah, now I can take care of myself. It almost was as though the same. It almost was as though the diagnosis was giving me permission to take care of myself. So what was your reaction to then,

like, decided how to heal it? There's obviously the Western alopathies, you know, suggesting chemotherapy versus the Ierveda that you explored as well. And just what ensued after the diagnosis leading up to eventually the coma. So what happened after is, so at the same time that my best friend was going through her illness, my husband, dad, Annie's brother-in-law was also going through cancer. So it was interesting that there was these two other people, very close to us, who were the same age as me, also going through cancer. And both of them were being treated by some of the best cancer hospitals in the world.

They were having the best treatment, the best Western treatment, shall we say, that money can buy. So my first reaction was it's not working on them because their health was deteriorating. Both of them were deteriorating. And from my eyes, it looked as though every time they went for treatment, their health would actually degenerate. They were actually getting worse and not better. That's how it looked to me. And so I said, I'm not going for that Western treatment because that was the first thing

that was recommended to me as well was it's the usual. You go for the chemo and I was watching this and I said, no, there's no point because it's not working for them. Why would it work for me? I'm going to try everything else. And so I approached the diagnosis from a perspective of I'm going to try everything and see what sticks. Now I want to say something else here as well. before the diagnosis, as I was watching, because both of these people got diagnosed at least a year, year and a half before I did, as I was watching them going through what they were going through, I developed a fear of cancer, a really big fear of cancer. You know, I was one of those people that just feared things easily. I feared disapproval. And so now I feared cancer. And so I made it my

mission to do everything I could to prevent getting cancer. So I kept hearing all these fear-based messages, you know, that you hear on drug ads and articles in magazines that one in three people are going to get cancer and cancer is on the rise and now microwaves cause cancer and using plastic containers cause cancer. And so it to me, it looked like everything caused. cancer. So already, before I was diagnosed, I was already living a life to do everything I could to prevent cancer, but I was doing it from this place of fear. So I was living a life where I feared cancer and was doing everything I could to prevent it. So I was eating really healthy, but it was I was eating only organic, which I still do, but I was eating only raw vegan foods,

and I was so careful of everything that I was putting into my mouth. I was taking a boatload of supplements that were antioxidant, anti-cancer, and I was doing everything I could to prevent cancer. and I got diagnosed with cancer. Because my life was so focused on avoiding cancer. And so when I got the diagnosis, it did surprise me because I thought, I'm doing everything I can to prevent cancer. And so I continued to explore different things.

and I then went into Ayurveda for a little bit as well. I went to India for a few months. And when I was in India, I was in a completely different environment. I was in an environment where the whole, I guess, the whole mindset around the cancer was very different because I was in an environment where you had people that were yoga students, Ayurveda students, and they were approaching things very, very differently. And in this in particular environment, the belief was that cancer in and of itself is not a disease. It's not something to be really so fearful of that every.

single illness is just an imbalance in your body. So the idea is to explore and discover what the imbalance is so that you can balance it. And so that's what we would do. Like I would get up and I would do the yoga moves and I then adjusted my diet. And what was really pleasantly surprising for me was that the range of food in the Ayurvedic diet was much broader. I now could suddenly eat things that I was fearful of eating before. You know, I was because I had been told that I need to have only raw, vegan food. Now I was eating all these cooked vegetables and rice and everything, and I was having dairy because I was following my constitution in the Ayurvedic system.

And so I actually thrived on that for a while. And I was doing this for about six months. and I got considerably better. So I had these tumors, you know, that were growing on my lymph nodes, and they started to shrink. They started to soften and shrink over a period of time. And I felt I was ready to go back home to Hong Kong. And so when I went back home to Hong Kong, people said, oh, wow, you look better and this is better. and everything was a lot better.

My husband was really pleased, and we tried to get on with our lives. But being back home in Hong Kong, I was once again faced with my best friend was getting worse, much worse. She was deteriorating, and now it was imminent that she was going to die. My brother-in-law was also getting much, much worse, and it was imminent he was going to die. And while this is happening, for me, all. the fear started to come back, all the fear of the cancer. And the people around me, I want to say here that the community that I had in Hong Kong were very disbelieving of anything that is not mainstream

medicine. So it felt like whatever I experienced in India got taken away from me as soon as I came back into this environment. And this is why in the things I teach now, I always say your environment is so important in considering your well-being. Because the people around me were saying that so, what did you do? And I told them what I did, Araveda and everything. And they said, and they would poo-poo it. They would almost make it sound like, oh, that's nonsense. That's not real medicine. And you need to go for the real stuff. You need to go see. an oncologist. And what, for me, in my mind, what they were saying didn't align because they were saying that if you don't do it, you're just being silly, you're being stupid. You need to go see a

proper doctor and those aren't real doctors. In my mind, I was seeing two people very close to me doing what they were saying and they were dying. Whereas what I had just done, I had felt better. But I started to fall in to all, everything that was being told to me and the fear came back. And then being with two people who I watched to the end and they died and that shocked me, I thought, wow, this is really a deadly disease. This is a killer. I better take it more seriously. And so then when I did go, then I started to notice, actually, the tumors started to come back.

And looking back now, I know it's because of the environment I was in. But at that time, what I was, what I believed because I was led to believe, that, oh, yeah, what you had was not permanent. And that's why it's coming back. And so then, you. I went to the oncologist and did the whole route and they said, oh, it's too late to save you. It's really aggressive and everything. So now leading up, before we dive into the coma and then the NDE experience, there's a couple golden threads that I think are really important to reflect on because both the cultural suppression of your expression of like your authentic desires and what your curiosities are,

if those are pushed down, and that, especially in conjunction with just the wide, umbrella of fear, of fear of death, fear of cancer, of illness, preventing something in a way you're already in resistance to that very thing. And so I think it's just an important reflection in having your NDE experience, then now connecting the dots looking backwards, you're able to see how much inauthenticity is directly linked to cultivating illness. So any thoughts there before you move on? Yeah, no, I think that's a really good direction to go in because it is the inauthenticity, the fear, all of that is what led to my illness. Absolutely. The repression, all of that. Yes. And most of us on some level are dealing with some sort of suppression of something

due to childhood or cultural situations. And that can, you know, on the most subtle end, just leave us feeling a little bit more anxious about life or down the line cultivating a deadly illness. And so what do you say to support people and giving themselves permission to be their authentic selves in an environment that maybe doesn't support that. So most people don't even know how important it is to discover their authentic self. So that's the first piece, is they need to even know that their soul came here with an intention. They don't even know that. And that is one of the keys of my message is I want you to know that,

that you have a purpose, a mission, a reason, an intention that your soul chose to come here into this life, into this body, you know, being born to these parents, to this family, into this culture, to experience this. There is a reason for it. And your only work, really, your only job is to discover that reason. In other words, discover your soul's intention. And even if you find that you are stuck or you're in a situation where your culture represses you, everybody experiences that at some level, not just when we're growing up, but even after we get older, when we have kids, when we're married and so on, there are things that you just feel that your hands are tied. You can't do it because you have other obligations.

it's still important for you to be aware of who you are, why you are here, and to actually be and to actually figure out ways that you can express yourself in a safe arena. All of this, like everything like what your soul's intention is, what your beliefs are, what your spiritual beliefs are, what's working for you, what's not working. for you. All of these things are really important to know, and I never knew that before. And the bigger thing is, I didn't know that if you are suffering from an illness, a chronic illness, and I'm not talking about end-of-life illness. So let's say prematurely, like as you're going through life, and you're suddenly hit with illnesses, and we think that we're victims of our illnesses. What I realize is

that's not usually the case. In most cases, we bring it on ourselves. And the things to consider, an illness is not a physical, it's not a physical problem. It is much more than that. It is a spiritual problem. It is an emotional problem. It is a problem of you repressing yourself. It is an existential essential problem. You have to bring all these elements in if you truly want to heal. And that's what I discovered. It's an important reflection because a lot of people can do all the right things, eat all the organic food, sit in front of a red light, sun their bum, you know, like all of the biohacks in the world. And yet if the place it's coming from is a resistant energy, fear-based energy, like you're talking to, there's all these psycho-emotional, emotional.

dynamics that that really have an effect on our biology to a that are that are much you know more important many would say than just you know the certain and I believe it's both right like eat eat healthy do the things that are going to be nourishing for your system but do it out of love for yourself exactly that's that's the difference is that eat healthy but do it out of love for yourself and if you don't love yourself and you don't love your life and you hate what you're doing then even eating healthy is not going to benefit you. But when you love yourself and you love your life, you will want to eat healthy because you want to live long.

You want to be healthy to be able to continue to do what you do. But if you splurge, your body's going to be able to handle it. Yeah. So one other thing that I think can be triggering for a lot of people that are either currently going through a chronic illness or maybe they have a dear friend or a loved one or parent or sibling that has a chronic illness, hearing that on some level, like, we chose this can be very triggering, that somehow I chose this illness for me. And so I'm just curious, having gone through it,

and we'll go into your experience of having the heightened awareness to seeing how on some level you needed that to be able to refine and actually discover your authentic self. What do you say to those people that are triggered by that thought that I chose it? So first of all, I would not use the word chose because I didn't choose it. So usually what I say is take responsibility for it, but it's not your fault. You didn't consciously choose it. Whereas if you don't take any responsibility for now healing it, when we don't take responsibility, what we're saying is, I am the victim of this. And when you are a victim of something, you become

helpless. And when you're helpless, that's when there's nothing I can do about it because I'm a victim of this situation. It happened to me. I can't control it. What I'm trying to say is, no, you didn't choose it because you were doing the best you can and whatever you were doing brought this on. But the reason it came on is because of certain things and actions and choices that we made in our lives that led us to this point of having this diagnosis, but we can look back and reverse engineer it. In other words, I don't want you to be a victim of your illness because we actually, one of the things I discovered is that we do have more autonomy over our lives than we have ever been led to believe.

We are conditioned to believe we're victims. Our systems, our mainstream media, the way we're educated, lead us to believe that we are victims of our circumstances, you know, of our culture and so on. And I can even talk a little bit more about how we can change the perceived restraints we feel and the repression we feel. We can change that. But our systems, the way they are, everything right down to our cultural conditioning,

social conditioning, our school systems and so on, lead us to believe that we're victims of our circumstances. But in actuality, we're not. Yeah. We're just so fed this cultural phenomenon of the last few years, even the pharmaceutical industry took up 75% of the advertising budget, billions and billions of dollars. It's so insidious and criminal in my eyes, you know, and we're fed this constant fear narrative. And so that aside, let's just dive into, you know, against your best efforts, you still in 2006, woke up or went into a coma and were taken to a separate hospital and walk us through that experience now, what that was like going into your NDE. Okay, so basically on February the 2nd, 2006, I didn't wake up. So I want to describe what my, what shape my body was in by that point. So by that point,

the doctors had three months, actually six weeks before this happened, the doctors told my husband that I only had three months to live. And I had tumors that were the size of golf balls by now, that were from the base of my skull all around my neck, all around my neck, under my arms, in my chest all the way down to my abdomen. My body had stopped absorbing nutrition. So I weighed about 85 pounds and I'm 5 foot 4 so I was really skinny at 85 pounds. I was like a walking skeleton, except I couldn't even walk because since my body had stopped absorbing nutrition, my muscles just completely atrophied and deteriorated. And so I had no, strength in my body at all. And I couldn't walk, so I was either in a wheelchair or a chair or I was

laying down. But even when I was sitting, I didn't even have the strength in my neck to hold my head up. My head was always hanging down like that. And I had to be like literally propped up. But when I would lie down, so my lungs would fill with fluid, by the way, and so when I would look, lie down, I would choke on my own fluid. Like, I had to have my lungs drained every three or four weeks of the fluid that was building up in my lungs. That was my condition. And I had these open skin lesions where toxins were coming out of my skin. They were like open wounds that had to constantly be cleaned and disinfected by the nurses. So I was in really bad shape. I was. I was. I was. was in a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort, and a lot of fear. And then on February 2nd, 2006, I went into a

coma. And that's when the doctors told my husband that these are my final hours. And they actually, they basically said I wouldn't be around for more than another 24 hours max, maximum. I probably wouldn't make it through the night. And that's when my family were like really distraught. My Danny was there in the hospital. My mom was there. And my brother who was in India at the time was flying, was getting on a plane to come and see me because he wanted to catch me before. I mean, he was distraught hearing the news. But I was in the coma. And I left basically. I left my body. It felt as though I left my body and I felt incredible. So even though my physical body was in a coma, my physical eyes were closed and my physical body was lying on that

hospital bed, I felt incredible because I was no longer in that body. It was like I had come out of my body and I was aware of everything that was happening in the room, but I felt light and free and just incredible, like better than I had ever felt in my life before, ever. And I felt enveloped by something that, I mean, I call it unconditional love, but actually there's no words to describe it. When I just say love, we overuse the word love and it just doesn't capture what I felt. It was euphoric. It was just like powerful, free. I just felt really incredible, but I was no longer attached to my physical body. And I wanted my family to know that I'm fine. I was even aware that my brother was trying to get on a plane to get to me before I died. And I even

thought to myself that I better not die or my physical body better not die before he gets here. Otherwise, he will be really upset. And yet I realized I could not communicate with them because I didn't have vocal cords. I didn't have, I was not in my body. So it was a weird feeling, but yet it just felt really, really incredible. and I felt I could see and hear everything that was going on all around. But I wasn't using my physical eyes because I didn't have physical eyes. I wasn't using my physical ears.

It was something more powerful. It's like you don't have to turn your head to look. I had 360 degree peripheral vision and I could see and hear everything the doctors were saying, like the doctor telling my husband that we only have, like she won't even make it through the night. And he even told my husband that her organs have now started shutting down. Her kidneys have already failed. We've taken tests for it, but we already know that the kidneys have gone because the toxic buildup is now happening in her body. And so they were talking about me and I could hear all of it.

And they were saying, the doctors were saying, her body is swelling up, and this means the kidneys have already stopped functioning. They were even talking about things like, should she even come out of it, we don't know what shape she would be in, you know? So it was very distressing for them, but I wanted them to know that I actually feel fantastic.

I'm good, I'm good. but there was no way for me to communicate it with them. And the vision was not with eyes, but it was more like a pure awareness. There was no limit to how much I could see. And I started to become aware of other things. It was like I could see my brother on the plane really distressed hearing about that I was dying and, you know, it was, and then I started to, it was like my world was expanding even more, and I became aware of other beings that were there to help me through this process.

And what I felt from these other beings was nothing but pure, unconditional love. and I recognized some of them as my deceased loved ones, like my dad, my best friend. And, you know, I had always thought that when I cross over one day, I would be judged for some of the things I'd done because I was always very harsh on myself and I thought I had let my dad down and I had run away from an arranged marriage and I'd caused a lot of shame. And so to me in my head, I'd done a lot of terrible things. my life. But when I crossed over, all I got was unconditional love and there was no judgment. And so here I was with my dad and it was his essence and my essence. And I was ready even for my

dad to judge me because I had disappointed him. So my dad had died 10 years prior. So I was ready for his judgment, but no, all I received from him was pure, unconditional love. Like he understood why I was the way I was and why I had run away from an arranged marriage. And I had brought him a lot of shame because I literally ran away from a marriage three days before the wedding after all the guests had come and everything. And I realized while I was there that when we, cross over. Not only do we leave behind a physical bodies, but we leave behind our culture, our religion, our beliefs, and all the baggage that we've accumulated over our lifetimes, we leave all of that behind. And the only thing that crosses over is our pure consciousness,

our pure essence, or I like to call it pure love, or we can even call it pure God. We can call it God, the God consciousness part of us. That's what crosses over. And I'd always thought that I was just a victim of my culture. But there, my spirit and my dad's spirit, like face to face, if you will, I realized that as much as I was a victim of my culture, He was a victim of his culture, of the same culture, doing the best he could. And the only thing I felt from him was unconditional love.

Can you share the analogy of the warehouse? Because I want to get a little bit more into the texture of your experience, if possible, of what that's like to feel like such a vast, you know, because I think people sometimes have experiences of something similar, whether it's in deep meditation or an altered state through breathwork or psychedelics. but this being unique that it was prolonged 36 hours and you had that just vastness of awareness with your consciousness and that you could recall things once you eventually came back to of things that were happening around you that, you know, somebody who's in a coma that

doesn't have access to their five senses you think wouldn't be able to do. Yes. So I like to use analogies because there's no words to describe the experience itself and what I experienced on the other side. And I use the analogy of the warehouse to explain that if you imagine that you are navigating through life with just one little flashlight in the darkness. So all around you is just pure darkness, pitch black, and all you have to navigate this darkness is one little flashlight. So all you can see is what you shine your flashlight on. And on. And so as you make your way through life or make your way through the environment that you're in,

you are lighting the way and your entire world, so to speak, is just what you can see with this flashlight because everything outside of this beam is just pure darkness. And so you make your way around the world, but imagine one day these big floodlights go on, And suddenly you realize you're in this humongous space. Let's say it's a huge warehouse for the sake of the analogy, for the sake of using an analogy. You're in this huge warehouse that has these shelves, like tall floor-to-ceiling shelves.

And this warehouse is so huge, you can't even see the end of it. and the ceilings are really, really high. And you've got these rows and rows and rows of shelves. And these shelves are lined with all different things, like things with colors that you've never seen before, and products and items and even experiences and books and places. They just exist on all these shelves. And many of which you've never heard off have seen before. And there are a few, here and there that you have seen and you have heard of, and you're aware of them because your flashlight had shone on them, even when it was dark, and so you're aware of it.

But now what you realize with the lights on is that there are way more things and experiences that exist than you ever realized, and there are way more experiences and probabilities and possibilities that exist than the ones you have ever experienced. So now, let's say the lights go back off and you're back to one flashlight again. You now know that even if your flashlight can only see this much, that's not the only thing that exists. So all these other things that you saw that you never knew existed.

these are all possibilities. In other words, there are millions of possibilities that exist simultaneously. But because our flashlight is only shining on one and everything else is in darkness, we believe that this is the only possibility and this is what life is. So the flashlight is a metaphor for our awareness. So when your awareness is being connected, conditioned that this is the only possibility. This is the only way to live. You are a victim of this circumstances and you are a victim of this or this is the only way to heal or this is the only method. This is the only way to God or we can apply it to anything. When you are being conditioned that there is only one way, that is your flashlight shining on one thing without the awareness

that there are many possibilities that exist. So what I realized is that many, many possibilities exist simultaneously. But very often, most of us live as though there's only the one that we're being conditioned with. And when we, and when that one possibility doesn't work for us, we become traumatized, depressed, anxious, and we lose ourselves. I think it a really important experience to experientially taste the vastness of our own consciousness and the myriad of ways. Not everybody will have a near-death experience,

but getting to experience the vastness of the expansiveness of your consciousness, like you said, once you experience how vast it is, now it can't shrink back to a point like that will always be with you. Once the mind expands, it can't shrink back to that point. Even if you're, the spotlight of your awareness now focuses on whatever the task is in your normal daily life, you know that you exist in this sea that is so much more vast, like you said, has so much more possibility and keeps that open mind so prevalent. And so you have this experience, you slipped into a coma, you go to the hospital, you have this awareness of everything that's happening around what people are saying, what people are doing, they're taking fluid out of your lungs.

You experience other beings, connection to past ones. You're in this inner luminous, blissful, euphoric, unconditionally loving space. And then did you have any insight into the awareness of the illness? Yes. And then like the choice to come back and coming out of the coma, take us through that. Okay, yes. So I, in that space, I understood why I had the illness. and I understood how it came to be that in that moment I was lying on that hospital bed dying.

And I understood how every choice and decision in my life had contributed to this happening. And so I did reach a point where I was given the choice as to whether I wanted to come back into my body or not. Now, no part of me wanted to come back because my body was sick and dying and suffering. And I thought, no, I don't want to come back into a suffering body. But immediately, I had this understanding. It was like a state of clarity. I had this understanding that now that I understood what caused the illness, my body would heal very, very quickly. I just understood that it would because my body, because it was like I don't need the illness

anymore. And so it was just so clear that my body would heal. And I started to gain more understanding about why, because I still wanted to know, yes, but why do I need to go back? and that's when I started to understand that I have a purpose and my purpose hasn't been fulfilled. And I didn't fully understand what my purpose was, but the key, the message is that you have a purpose and if you're cutting your life short, you won't fulfill your purpose. It doesn't matter what your purpose is. You can go back and figure it out. But we're not telling you what your purpose is.

but you have a purpose. And if you don't go back, what I understood was that my husband's purpose, Danny's purpose, is linked to my purpose. There was a reason we were together. And if I didn't go back, he would not be able to complete his purpose either. So there was this deep understanding of how we're all interconnected. And any decision I make will affect other people around me. me. And I also got this understanding, you know, because the other thing is I was questioning because it was almost like I didn't want to come back. And I even felt, I went as far as to even feel that if Danny doesn't complete his purpose, wouldn't he just come and join me there? So, but I realized that we had made this pact to come and complete this purpose together.

but also because my kidneys in my body were already shut down, so I thought, I was also shown that if I chose to go back, the test results for my kidney function would come back showing that my kidneys were actually not completely dead, they were actually functioning and could be healed, that it was reversible. But if I chose to stay on that side, if I chose not to come back, the test results of the test that was already taken would come back showing that I had died due to kidney failure and organ failure. So the test results would show that my kidneys had failed. Okay, so you come back and they take fluid out of your lungs and then you start to open your eyes. So in fact, what happened is, so my dad is the one that actually said to me that you need to go back and live your life fearlessly.

And I started to get a vision of what my life would look like, that I had a purpose. And the purpose involved speaking to a lot of people. Now, I want you to understand how incredulous that was to me, someone who was a people pleaser, painfully shy, happy to hide. behind other people's shadows. That was not who I was. But there I was seeing this vision of me speaking in front of thousands of people. I didn't know what I was even going to be speaking to them about. But then my dad said to me, so I was like, what is that?

And so my dad was like, you don't have to figure it out. just go back and live your life fearlessly and it will unfold. Now living my life fearlessly means being myself fearlessly. That's all I had to do was to be myself. And so my dad's last words to me was go back and live your life fearlessly. And that's when my eyes started to open. Now during life, it was my dad that instilled fear in me growing up. But in death, it was my dad who said, me free from the fear. And that's when my eyes started to open. So you came back and you just like kind of one foot's in between both worlds and what

happened to your physical body as you started to come back in the coming weeks? So after I came back, like first of all, I was really groggy and I was telling my family. So my brother was there. He'd got off the plane. He'd got there. And I said, oh, I knew you were on your way. and then I started to say, Dad is here, Dad is here. It's not my time. I'm not going to die. And so they all just thought I was delirious. And they called the doctor to come in. And so when he walked in the room, now he was the doctor that had only come on duty from the time I went into the coma. In other words, he had never seen me before the coma. I had never seen him before the coma. But as soon as he came in, I had rest him by his name. I said, good afternoon, Dr. Chan. He said, how do you know my name? You've never

seen me. You were in the coma. And I said, really? And because I'd been seeing him all along. And then he said, you know, and he started to tell my family that it's common for them to open their eyes from time to time, but just remember, she's still in critical condition. Her kidneys are still failing, blah, blah. So he told them my family not to raise their hopes. And then he leaves the room. And I said to my husband, I said that why was he so surprised? Isn't he the doctor that said that I wouldn't even make it through the night? And that's when Danny said, he didn't even say that here in the room. He said it down the hallway at the nurses station. You couldn't possibly have heard that. And then what's

started to happen is the following day, my kidney test results came in and it showed, they said, they came in and the doctor came in and said, I have good news for you. Your kidneys are functioning. And I just kind of said, I knew that. And then my tumors started to shrink really, really dramatically. Like in four or five days, they shrunk by about 60, 70%. I started to insist, I want them to take all the tubes out because I had a food tube. oxygen tube, I had all these tubes. And the doctors were really hesitant to take the tubes out, but I said, no, I know I'm fine. I can breathe now. When they took out the fluid from my lungs that last time while I was in the coma, they never needed to take out fluid. It never built up again.

And they could not figure what was happening. My doctor even made the gesture of, you know, when he walked into my room, he goes, I don't even know what to write. in your medical record, he made the gesture of throwing it into the waste bin, the trash can in the room. He just sort of said, this should go in here. I don't even know what to write anymore. And within three weeks, they were having difficulty finding any trace of cancer in my body. And in five weeks, they let me go home and live my life cancer free. So wild. And never to remember. return again. Yeah. So what have you made of that? I mean, it's just, it sounds so miraculous and it is.

And yet there is this place within us that I believe we all are and have access to that has the like that capacity for healing potential. And you very much so were there and experienced that for 36-ish hours, you know. And so how was it like just navigating back? into the 3D world just having this experience. And then also I do want to dive into how sometimes our memory culturally or like the spiritual language that we have for these things can color and change how we interpret certain experiences, you know? And I'm, I feel like I'm a very healthy skeptic when it comes to like many different aspects in which people just readily accept in terms of other people's spiritual experience. And I'm just curious how have you since, I guess,

validated the, I mean, you don't need to validate the experience because it was so potent for you, but like the interpretation of connecting with certain people, whether they were really there or whether it was communicating in your own recreation of them. Like how do you kind of make sense of that? Okay, so in terms of communicating or connecting, let's say communicating with other people about what happened. So I'm breaking down your question. So first of all, I have not looked for other people to give it credibility or verify.

Because for me, the gift was in the healing itself. So the gift was in the healing. And one of the things that I'd learned very early on, like I had this euphoric experience. It was incredible. and life should have been easy after. But I realized once I had to deal with this physical realm we're in, this was the challenge. Being dead was easy.

Living life is the challenge. And bringing that experience into this physical life is the challenge. And what surprised me is how resistant people are. They were very, very resistant to, my thoughts, my beliefs, the way I was living my life. So nobody disputed the actual healing because I had the medical records to prove it. But people saw it. It happened before their eyes. People were shocked. When I came out of the hospital, people were shocked because I went in the hospital. Everybody thought I was going in to die. Everybody heard I was on my deathbed. The entire world where like

all my relatives, all my friends. My husband was sending messages, my family, my brother, my sister-in-law saying, please pray for her, please chant for her, depending what religion they were. So one of the things that I believe I have in my favor is that I did grow up in a very multicultural background because I went to a British school. I grew up in a Chinese city and I have ethnically Indian parents. So I have never actually taken on any one particular religion as being the one true religion. So that's one. But the second thing is that I have never tried to convince anybody that what happened to me is the truth. And so I'm very clear when I speak about my experience that this is what I experienced and this is the impact it had on me. And then I allow people to take from it

whatever resonates and reject what doesn't. That's kind of how I operate in the world. And I never want to make anybody wrong about their beliefs because our experiences of our life is what informs our thinking. And I happen to have a near-death experience which informs my thinking, but not everybody has that experience. It can be tough when you try to apply the rigor of the intellect to dissect and label with language, which is inherently already very limited to an experience that is so vast and expansive and that is touching a place of intelligence that is much bigger than just our intellect, right? Yes. And so that level of intelligence that you tapped into, what did you realize about who we are in our true essence and the nature of God?

So I used to believe that God is a being that is separate from us. But when I was in that realm, I realized that there is no separation, that we are a facet of God. You are, I am. We are all God expressing itself, herself, himself, whatever. There's no gender. In that realm, there's no gender. So I realized all of us are facets of God.

And one of the most impactful things that happened to me after the experience upon looking back on my life, I remember this is literally a couple of days after the near-death experience. and I started taking all the tubes out and maybe about six, seven days after the experience. One of the nurses said that I needed to start getting out of the bed and walking and using my limbs and building up strength again in my muscles. And so she helps me out of the bed and I said, I want to look at myself in the mirror, in the bathroom.

I need to look in the mirror because I haven't seen myself in a long time. And so she takes me, she walks me to the bathroom, you know, I've got the IV stand one hand and her arm and the other. And we walked to the bathroom and I look in the mirror and I really hadn't seen myself in a long time. And so I was shocked at what I saw. I was much, much skinnier than I had thought. My face was really gaunt with my cheeks like sunken in. My eyes looked like they were bulging out of my head. and I had no hair. I was bald and I had these open skin lesions in my neck. And I looked at myself

and I actually started to cry and I looked in my eyes and I cried not out of vanity or anything, but more because this was the first time that I saw God in my own eyes. And it was the first time I realized, because I had spent a lifetime of pleasing other people and making sure I didn't disappoint other people and making sure everyone around me was happy and liked me and I needed everybody's approval. This was the first time that I saw me and I understood I don't need anyone's approval because I too, like everyone else, I too am an expression of God and I saw God in my eyes. And I apologized to myself in the mirror and said, I will never do to you again what I did to you that caused me to get to this state. I saw, I really saw that I had done this to me

by forsaking myself. I've heard you share that. And this experience shifted thinking that God is a being to God is a state of being. Yes. And how like on a crystal ball or a disco ball. We're all like this unique individuation of God expressing itself. Yes. Through all of our unique gifts and creativity. And so coming back to that realization, now it's like you got a second lease on life. You have this new opportunity to create life and this follow this purpose that still hasn't been fully clear and realized to you yet. but so just take us on that journey from integrating that moment looking at yourself in the mirror seeing your physical body which had been so depleted but now seeing God in your eyes for the

first time and this new outlook of potential to create in your life so I knew at that moment that really my only purpose was really just to recognize that and to allow life to unfold. And I made certain commitments to myself, you know, because what it does, what an experience like that does is it changes your value system. It changes what matters in life. Not everyone gets to experience death before they die. And that's when you realize that, oh, the way I've been living life, you know,

the most important things were like pleasing other people or having, enough money to have a nice home. But suddenly, none of those things matter anymore. So the values really changed and I went on a quest to try and figure out my purpose and the purpose I have with Danny. Now, here's the interesting thing. I just want to say that Danny was there by my side the whole time holding my hand. He was willing me to come back. And he never left my side. He would even lie on the hospital bed with me. And he would, and you know, when I would say, even before I went into the coma, when I would say, I'm dying and he would go, no, you're not. And I would say, what are you going to do if I die? And he would say, I'm going to come and get you. I'm not going to let you die.

Not on my watch. You're going to die. And so when I told you. him later that did you know that your purpose and my purpose is linked? And if I died, you wouldn't be able to complete your purpose. And he said, I knew that. And I said, you did. And so what is your purpose? Do you know your purpose? And he said, yeah, my purpose was to bring you back and make sure you stay alive. So if you died, I wouldn't have completed my purpose. But yeah. But yes, going back to your question of unraveling everything after the fact, it wasn't easy at all. It wasn't easy because I lived in a culture that I realized that the culture around me, the community, the culture, you know, and the people, they are lovely, well-meaning people. However, the values were very, very different because I lived in a culture where people were very high achieving, hardworking.

They were either bringing up families or they were working hard in executive, high paying executive jobs that didn't interest me at all anymore. and very competitive. I lived in a very competitive culture. And also, they did not see any relationship between our life's purpose and our well-being. And, you know, it was purely get as successful as you can. It doesn't matter if it's hard work. It doesn't matter if you hate your life. Get the country club membership and so on.

And none of those things mattered to me. anymore at all. I was more interested in figuring out and I was interested in the visions I had when I was on the other side. Like what? Me? And out speaking in front of people? That's not me. And yet when it transpired, it felt so right. It felt so right. But in the beginning, when Danny and I felt we had to move away kind of to find ourselves. It was like we both had the experience together. It changed both of us. And we had to move away. A lot of people thought that we were not being realistic, that we needed to face life. We needed to go back to finding a job and what are you guys doing and why are you wasting your time and you're really lucky you got the second lease of life.

So make the most of it now. But I couldn't. I needed to write. So that was the first thing for me. I just needed to write and write and write, and it felt very cathartic. And it just kept coming out, everything that I experienced on that side. So the journey afterwards, which kind of long story short, is you wrote a lot, you got on the NDE website, eventually started sharing your story more, and got discovered by Wayne Dyer, who really committed to writing the forward to your book, dying to be me, and we went on tour with him, right?

and anything about you, because it can feel a little daunting, I think for most people when they realize, okay, I want to speak to a lot of people or I have something to share, then it's on you to actually do the things to write the book. And I think these mentors, guides, angels come into our life,

Wayne being one of them for you to help really create a platform and put your story on the map and give it wings to fly and share with people, which you've done with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people now. And so anything else you want to share on getting connected with Wayne and the writing of the book? So the writing of the book came organically.

Again, I've never been an author before. I never thought of myself as an author. But it just happened organically because I was writing and writing and writing from the time I had the near-death experience. And then I didn't even look for a publisher or anything. but Wayne discovered my book on the, my story, sorry, on the internet. And he had his publisher, Hay House, track me down. And I received an email from them on my birthday.

And, you know, the story that went viral on the internet, it was on an NDE website, and it didn't even have my full name on it. It was just Anita M's NDE, and somebody printed it out and handed it to Wayne. And he even told me that he said that usually people give him things all the time. They give him papers and they give him stuff, books. He never reads it. He sometimes will read the first two lines and then it'll go in the trash. And this case, he said, he started reading the first couple of lines and it gripped him. And he said to me, do you know that your story on the internet on the NDE site printed out is 20 pages of letter paper and single line spacing. I said,

no, I didn't realize. He said, you had me gripped from the first word all the way to the last word. And so he contacted Hayhouse and he said, you have to track this woman down. And you have to get her to sign a book contract, get her to write a book. And he said, don't put her through the vetting process or anything because I am going to write the forward and I am single-handedly going to promote this book and get her into the New York Times bestseller list. So basically he was commanding Hay House, not asking them to check me out of a widow, commanding them that you get her. And they didn't even realize, it took them a few months to track me down. They didn't even realize that the day they found me was my birthday that year. And so I got this email that said,

Wayne Dyer has discovered your story and asked us to track you down. And we would like to ask you to write a book, which we would publish, and he will promote. And so I read it and I started crying. I thought, this is what my dad meant that it will unfold. It will just unfold. And I had been being myself in that I didn't go back to the old life I had. You see, the thing is the old life is what killed me and I couldn't go back because the old life is what gave me cancer. So I had been being authentic. I had been living my life as best as I could just through self-love. And here, this book deal just landed in my lap on my birthday. So I wrote back right away and I said, thank you. Oh my God, I can't believe this. I hope this is not a joke or something or spam,

but it's my birthday today. And she wrote back right away. And she wrote back right away. She said, you know, she said she's the chief editor or something. And she said, no, this is real and happy birthday. And they made the process really easy for me. And then Wayne and I would talk to each other on the phone until they flew me there. And I want to just share this piece, which was the first time that Wayne ever brought me up on stage. So they flew me from Hong Kong to L.A. to speak at an event. Pasadena where Wayne was speaking. So it was the event had about 3,000 people in the audience,

and they were live streaming to thousands more. So he's on stage first, and he's sharing with the audience. He says, and there's this woman from Hong Kong who had cancer, and it was end stage, and she was about to die, and he goes, he shares my story. And he says, in fact, we've flown her here so she can share the story with you herself. And the audience were like, what? And so I was right there in the front row, and he had me come up on stage. And I came up on stage, and I was standing there.

They give me a mic, and I'm looking out at the stage, and I started to shiver because this was the scene I had seen in the near-death experience of me standing in front of thousands of people. and I didn't know at that time what I was saying, but that was the very scene of me there in front of thousands of people. And I was quivering as I started to speak. And it was just an incredible feeling like deja vu, like I know this scene. And then Wayne said, you're shaking. Are you scared? And I said, yes, of course I'm scared. I've never spoken in front of an audience to size in my life. And I never thought I would have to. And he said, what have you got to be scared about? You've been dead and back.

And I said, being dead is easier than public speaking. Incredible. What a beautiful just turn of events. Your story is so powerful and the whole rebirth process, which it feels like you were reborn from that experience in so many ways. And I just, I know firsthand the, even just the thought. And mental exercise of contemplating your own mortality can bring a sense of immediacy and presence into what you really value, what actually matters the most. Am I living in alignment? Like these things that we really stress over in our day-to-day life seemingly, they become

minute in the grand horizon and the understanding of we're going to die. And so anything else that can help people bring that, I guess, sense of reconsidering and paying attention to what their values, what are most important to them and their own mortality and like the reminder that we are going to die because most of us are walking around just like we're not going to die. Yes. We kind of forget. So one of the things that I realized is that the most important value is love. And I know, you know, we overuse the word love and it sounds, it can sound a little flaky. But if there was another word, I would use it. But love truly is the most important value, and it starts with self-love. It's really, really important for us to love

ourselves, because only when we love ourselves can we really give the highest quality of love to the people around us. You're not really giving people, you're not really doing people of service when you don't love yourself. One of the things that I learned also is that we need to know where our energy is at. Energy is so important. I think what really, again, this is my interpretation and my language, and I'm going to use the word energy, but I wish it was a different word. but we are not physical beings. We are actually spiritual beings or energy beings. And we don't realize it. We think that we are just these physical bodies and we operate as if we just have five senses and we live in this three-dimensional world. But we are actually much more than that, much more. We're actually multi-sensory beings.

and we live in a multi-dimensional reality. And these guides and loved ones are there like I know for me, and I do know they are there for everyone, even if we're not aware they are. We just can't see them with our physical eyes, but they are there. There's stuff happening behind the scenes all the time. But we go through life as if that whole part doesn't exist,

as if all we are are five sensory physical beings in a three-dimensional world. That is the illusion. That is not true. We can turn those warehouse lights on any time, but we just have to be willing to. We just have to be open to it. It's unfortunate that we live in a culture, and I think it's changing,

but certainly for the most part when I was growing up, We live in a culture that sees anything that is outside of three-dimensional, five-century, as being woo-woo and out there. And people who only focus on material sciences and academics are seen as more intellectual. It's unfortunate that those who are seen as intellectual have completely dismissed anything beyond our five senses and there's three dimensions because we're missing out on a whole lot. So I know it's changing particularly for generations like your generation and people younger. It's definitely changing. So it's very heartening. But if only people knew, because right now, for example,

our political system, our medical system, all of these operate as though we are three-dimensional five-sensory beings. They don't take into consideration that there is so much more. And so we live from this place of being a victim, a victim of our political candidates and a victim of our medical conditions when we're not. Once you realize, once you turn on those warehouse lights,

you know that you're not a victim. Yeah, I wish we had the capacity for a wide-scale warehouse light turning on. you know like there is there's something there's a distinction here with how you know because you talked about self-love and this need to love ourselves and in your experience you had not just the shift to i need to love myself but you actually experienced yourself as love which is i think the shift in this personal development self-improvement scene where you're just trying to always incrementally improve and um there's a shift which is like the

spiritual understanding of self-realization to actually discover who you are in your innate essence, which is always there and it's not something you have to achieve because you already have it. That's why you discover it or you realize it. You don't like garner it. And so any other words you have for people to die before they die, to realize their self-ass love, for those that, you know, and for you continuing on this journey, you know, outside of your first experience, How have you maintained this state of awareness? I'm sure you go in ups and downs like many of us do. For people to like, how can you invite people to continue to taste this in their life?

So first of all, you will go through ups and downs. I go through ups and downs. So that's one thing. And be okay with the downs. Just live through them, ride them out and know that you're going to come out of it. The other thing that you need to know is that when you are constantly striving, to be better, do better, do more. Like one of the fallouts I say of this whole self-help, self-improvement,

is that in actuality, the message you are sending yourself is, I'm not good enough. I need to do more, be more, to be better. And so I tell people, watch out for that because you are good enough. You are good enough and stop sending yourself the message that you need to be more, do more. maybe you need the opposite message maybe in fact you're doing too much maybe stop so for people who are at this moment struggling um the default seems to be what am i getting wrong what do i need to do more of where am i going i do this work i do so much of this work and i shouldn't be feeling this way right now

and so we look for the next course or the next thing to do my my suggestion would be to stop, just stop, and maybe it's more a case of undoing. And it's more a case of, like, in other words, being authentic means letting go and undoing. A metaphor I like to use is one of, you know, Michelangelo, the sculpture, the artist, the sculpture. And he used to carve out these beautiful sculptures of angels just from rock, from big, stones and he would just chisel and carve and there would be an angel. And when somebody once asked him, how do you manage to carve these beautiful angels? Like he had no plans or no architectural drawings, nothing. And he said, the angel was always there. I just chiseled away at the rock to set the

angel free. So basically, that's a metaphor for us. Set yourself free. You don't need. Just chiseled away at all the work and all the things, set yourself free, set yourself free. When we constantly believe that we have to, that we have to be controlled, like for example, even when we learn, even our teachings are always teaching us that you need to, even particularly religious teachings, that people need to be controlled because if you let them free, It would be chaotic, but maybe it wouldn't. Maybe it would be beautiful because what you're setting free is a whole bunch of souls who are facets of God being allowed to actually freely be expressions of God. Trust that you are an expression of God. So even if you're going through a down period,

even if you're going through something that doesn't feel good right now, allow yourself just to be there and don't feel that you have to even work at it. I think you're speaking to this energy of bringing this willingness to explore and let go of who we're not. And like you had in your NDE experience of this life review of seeing what led you up into that point. It's like how can we bring that life review and that that, that understanding of how precious this life is, like, right now. So we don't have to wait to the screams. We can listen to the whispers before they turn into screams.

Yes, exactly right. Exactly. If you review your life right now, and what I do, what I do when I'm going through a down phase is I actually check in with my energetic state. And in a way, that's how I would suggest people, check in. They don't have to die. One of the reasons I even share what I share is because I believe that everybody should be able to do this. You don't have to die. And I'm not trying to... Thank God. Yeah. And I want people to know this before they die. I think people should be taught this. I think

they should know this from the time they're really young because it can help them to know that you are something so much more. So an easy exercise I tell people to do. is check in with your energy state. And if you were to just close your eyes and imagine that you are an energy being and an energy being has an oric field. And if you just allow your imagination to run wild, how big is your energy right now? How big is your oric field? So if somebody was really unhappy, depressed, depleted, their oric field or their energy would be really small. It would be shrunken. But if somebody is living their passion and they love their life or they're in love and they're happy, their oric feel, their energy would be huge. It would be really big. Now, if you have the capacity to see your own energy and the energy of other people, that would be so helpful because you would immediately be able to see, oh, when I do this, when I go here, when I hang with these people, my energy shrinks right down. But when I'm doing this, my energy expands. If you could be aware that this is actually happening, this is real, this is

actually happening, whether you can see it or not, whether you're aware of it or not, that was one of the things I learned, that this is happening with my energy. So when I am saying yes to something that I really want to say no to, but I am doing it grudgingly, but I really don't want to do it, my energy field is shrinking. Now, if you live a life where your energy field is shrinking and low, and every day you're not doing anything to expand your energy field, but you're like going to a job you hate or in a relationship that's not working for you and you're in this drudgery life, eventually it's going to appear physically in your physical body. when we're not giving ourselves the chance to listen to what's really happening within our own inner dialogue

what's happening within our own biology then it like those like we spoke to those whispers start to turn into screams and we develop a chronic illness or something that really forces you to look at and some people still don't look at it they still don't look at it and they transition into the next yeah they still don't look at it because they still believe that it is just a physical medical illness for some people but yeah so with the energy field, what we also do is that we tend to believe that if I chase this, if I have this reward, if I have this goal, I'll be happy. And we find we're still not. But if you could see your energy, you would know what makes you happy. And what you would do is you would only do the things or pursue the things that expand your energy field.

So in the world we live in today, for example, we revere people who have tons of money, say, and fame and fortune. But we have no idea what their energy field is. Maybe they're really unhappy. If you could see energy, you would revere the people with huge energy fields and you wouldn't care how much money they had or didn't have. So basically, just an exercise I give people is no matter where you are in life, what you're doing, just check into your energy field. I found at least in my own personal life, I'm sure you and many people resonate that it's less of needing to do anything, but like creating space just for you to pay attention to what's already there. I have a saying that when you get quiet, what needs to be heard will get loud.

And creating space just to pay attention and like attention being our spiritual currency, what we do with our awareness, the spotlight of our consciousness, to pay attention to what's happening within our own mind and heart and body. We can discover things that will save us a lot of suffering later down the line. But then also keep us in alignment like Michelangelo, you know, chipping away at the sculpture of the sculpture of, our being. It's just, I think, a powerful invitation for people to create that spaciousness to start to listen to what's happening inside them. Yes, exactly. A hundred percent. It's just that.

Is there any other realization you had around past lives, previous incarnations, many different opinions people have on what the reality is of this? But I thought that you had an interesting distinction about the nature of time. I'd love for you to share a little bit of. Yes. So I perceived time as not being linear on the other side. Of course, this was also confirmed to me because of the test results, because the tests were taken and the results would be determined, the results would be determined by whether I chose to come back into life or not, even though the tests were taken. So time is not linear. Literally, the results can be changed.

depending on my choice. But what I realized, for example, about reincarnation, I had, having Hindu parents, I grew up believing also in reincarnation being linear. You live one life and then your next one is determined by how you did in this one and so on. It's sequential. What I realized when I was on the other side, it doesn't quite work that way. My understanding of it was pretty different. from what I had learned. And it's not like if I do something wrong in this life or something bad, I'm going to get punished in the next life. No, all our lives together go into making up the experience for a soul, for my soul's experience.

So I used the analogy of a building. So I was able to, when I was on that side, see multiple lives, but I saw them clearly, not as sequences of one after the other, but just, oh, in this life, I was this, oh, in this life, and they were all there equally clearly. And I saw the future of this life if I chose to come back. This is what awaits me. But if you imagine, like, let's just say a seven-story building, and each story is one apartment and seven stories. And if you go inside this building, you can only be on one story or inside one apartment at a time. You can't be in all seven apartments, but you can only be in one at a time. And then you have to leave that apartment to go to the next one. But that apartment still exists. you, so let's say the you is your awareness and each apartment is one lifetime. Now, if you are

outside the building, you can see the whole building and all seven apartments exist simultaneously, but you can only live one at a time. But the whole building is what I say is the soul. The building contains seven apartments. So the soul has all these lives. and the collection of all these lives makes up the experiences of the soul. But it's not that the soul has to be punished for something that's another, what they did in another life. It's more like the soul needed this experience to complete its experience as a soul. I find it very fascinating. And it's an interesting thought experiment at the very least of the multiple experiences

and we have all this what scientists call junk DNA of the capacity to store all this memory. And yeah, I always just, I love hearing people's experience when they're in that state of what the reality is of where we came from and where we're going. And it's tough to fit in the Western logical mind. It is tough to fit. And that's why I use analogies. Yeah. And so, you know, even when people do,

what they call past life regressions, you're getting access to those other lives in your apartment building, so to speak. You're getting access to the other apartments. You can have other lives bleed through if it's relevant to this one. What would you just say for somebody that right now has a loved one or they themselves are struggling really through a chronic illness moment? They're sick. They have the doctors maybe telling them they don't have that much longer to live. What do you say? because I'm sure you get approached by people like this quite often that want a solution, they want an answer, that want a powerful experience, but can't, they just feel like they keep hitting, you know, dead ends. So I would say a few things. First of all, I would say that

nobody can tell you when you're going to die. If a doctor says that you have three months to live or whatever, you don't have much time, try and disregard it. I would almost go. even stronger and say you need a different doctor because if I can turn around from the stage I was at, anybody can turn around. And so that's one. The other thing I would say is start thinking about what you would do with your life if you had a clean bill of health right now. Like just imagine you have a clean bill of health. What do you want to do with the rest of your life? Because there are reasons that brought you to this point of where you're not, where you're not well or you're struggling, you have these chronic illnesses. And imagine if somebody hated their life and now they

have a chronic illness and now you're fighting to stay alive to go back to a life which you hated, you want to start loving the life that you're going to have as a well person. That is the first step. You need to create a life that you love and one that you want to live. And start living that life and then your wellness is secondary to that. Start creating the life you love, create the life that you want to live for the rest of your life, and then start focusing on the things that you're going to do to attain that. And really turning your health around is something that you can do. But also another first step, I would say, is that evaluate, or this is the second step,

evaluate the things in your life that you are currently doing that you don't want to do and start letting go of those things. Start saying no to the things that you don't want to do. And then start saying yes to the things you've always wanted to do. I think just a powerful place to kind of wrap up is what we've been shared. about, you know, I feel very connected to your experience or your NDE, about reflecting on who we are in our true essence and our true nature. Like we put down all the labels of who we're not, which we used to describe ourselves in this human flesh suit of our name, our cast, our creed, our gender, our religion, all of these beliefs as we start to settle and let go and just realize that fundamentally

it's not who we are, but there is something, there's a quality and an essence within us that is really a more accurate depiction of who we innately are. Just any reminders that you have to close out to help people continually to just remind them who they really are and who they are here to be for the world. So who we really are is actually something or someone much bigger and more powerful than our physical bodies, much bigger. physical bodies are just like the tip of the iceberg. And what I would want to remind people is to live from the iceberg and not just from the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, I think it's powerful.

It invites people to remember who they are as a being. Yes. And not just this cog in an economic machine or to fulfill somebody else's purpose, but we're here to play a big part in our own unique drop. We can actually change the world, any one of us have the power to change the world in a bigger way than we think. And in fact, my third book, Sensitive, It's the New Strong, is really about, you know, the people who are the ones who are actually aware that you are so much more, you are aware that you are a facet of God, that you are a soul, you are huge, you have this power. Unfortunately, these people are the ones who are the quietest, most introverted people in the world. And the loudest voices are the ones who are the more ruthless, the more capitalistic,

the more perhaps operating from ego more. And so we have a world that's dominated by one set of voices, whereas we need to hear more from the other set of voices. But by its very nature of being so aware of our God consciousness, it actually makes us more introspective and less loud. And so we feel as though we are victims of a world that's being created by the louder voices. So we need to actually become aware that just because those voices are louder doesn't mean we're less powerful. We are actually extremely powerful because we're aware of a whole other dimension that is beyond this one. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. I know you've shared it so many times. And we were talking a little bit beforehand how sometimes sharing the story of your illness. And I could imagine

how I feel like it would one dilute the experience. I feel like especially after I have, you know, a profound experience talking about it repeatedly can dilute my connectedness to it. But I know you've had a lot of time to integrate and heal and realize that it's important to set the context for what you're sharing with the insights of how we can live our authentic selves and how sensitives have the capacity to really change the world and so many important reminders about loving yourself and who we are in our core and any other last words that you have for our audience before closing out. It's important to love yourself like your life depends on it because it does. I learned the hard way that it does.

It's a beautiful quality I find when people have these close encounters with death or they realize their own impermanence is this embracing of the human experience and all of it and like holding for all of it, you know, and not separating this physical experience as lesser than a spiritual one. Or, you know, it's beautiful. And I can feel the joy that you bring to the work that you do. And so just thank you so much. One of the other things that I learned, which was so important, is that I had always made my choices from a place of fear.

Every choice was made from a place of fear. And unfortunately, we live in a world that propagates fear in everything, like even in our education system. It's about the fear of failing. It's about the fear of not getting into the best schools and so on. And our political system, it's always about fear dividing us, the fear that, they're not like us and so on. And every system of us, even our religious systems, the organized religion, a lot of their teachings are based in fear so that you would follow this religion versus that religion. But death actually taught me that I need to make my choices from a place of

love. We all do. And everything we do, we need to do because we love. to do it because we want to do it, not because we're scared of the consequences. And even our medical systems teach us to fear disease. We would have a much, much more powerful world if people were taught to operate from a place of love instead of fear. if medicine and if our health care system taught us what wellness looked like, if the focus, if all the trillions of dollars were spent on wellness research and what it means to be well and healthy, we would cure cancer just like that. But at the moment, the focus is on cancer, on illness. It's not on wellness. and it's the same in every system of ours.

In our education system, the focus isn't on the passion for learning. It's on the fear of failing. Yeah. It's a powerful note to end on just that level of embracing your life and choosing to make choices from a place of what's really going to matter to you by the time you're on your deathbed and what you truly have joy and love for in life. Yes. So many incredible things to reflect on in this episode personally,

and I'm sure our audience can connect and relate. So just thank you so much for coming out today and sharing yourself and your story. I really thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me, Andre. Yeah, of course. And for everybody that's been tuning in to this episode of the Know They Self podcast, please let us know how this has uniquely impacted you.

And also, we are both two individuals and we dove more into your story today. And I share mine sometimes on this podcast. But it's really beautiful to feel into the family that's building of people that are awakening to these realizations as well in their own life. And I'm just so curious to hear all the facets of stories that people have out there. So please do share. Thank you for coming on this journey. And until next time, be welcome.