Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Doctors Called It Divine Intervention! Anita Moorjani’s Near-Death Experience, Unexplainable Cancer Recovery & Her Message of Hope

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

Cancer Put Her in a Coma. She Survived. Her Near Death Experience Changed Everything. Mayim Bialik's Breakdown delves into Anita Moorjani’s (renowned author, TedX speaker & self-help spiritual speaker) mind-blowing near-death experience (NDE) story and how it completely transformed her cancer, her path to healing & spiritual awakening, and how it changed the way she viewed life after death. Before her miraculous cancer recovery, Anita opens up like never before about the emotional toll of escaping an arranged marriage, her belief that neglecting her own needs while caring for others may have contributed to her cancer, and why living out of alignment with your true self can be toxic (and even deadly). Her integration journey post-NDE wasn’t easy. Friends and family treated her like the same person — but she had touched something far greater than this world, and she couldn’t go back. Anita Moorjani also breaks down: - Her belief that heaven is not a place, but a state of being - How we’re all eternally connected — past, present, and future - Why intuition, self-love, & authenticity are the real medicine we've all been missing - How you’re likely manifesting wrong - How Ayurveda and naturopathic healing deeply resonated with her healing journey - Difference between unconditional love (the kind people experience during NDEs) and earthly love - Why deepening your intuition starts with radical self-confidence - How letting go of what isn’t authentically you is the key to ultimate healing This is not just a story about cancer — it's a wake-up call about life, death, spiritual awakening and the power of living as your truest self. Tune in to MBB now if you’ve ever felt stuck, afraid, disconnected, or if you’ve ever wondered what really happens after we die. The Anita Moorjani Sanctuary: https://www.amsanctuary.com/ The 10th Anniversary Edition of Anita Moorjani’s memoir, Dying to Be Me: https://a.co/d/aRJDs7Q Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The doctor was telling my husband that these are her final hours. She won't even make it through the night. I started to notice that I wasn't feeling any more pain. The fear was gone. I'm not in my body anymore. How do you get from a terminal stage diagnosis of cancer to having an undetectable level of cancer a month later, an encounter that is out of this world?

I can only put it down to divine intervention. You were clinically in a coma. I was seeing where other people had hurt me or where I had allowed myself to be hurt. That's what led me to this point. That's how I squashed my little spirit and soul. For the first time, I felt like I was enveloped in this feeling of unconditional love. I was loved just because I exist. I was shown scenes of my future.

That's when I was told, now that you're going to be able to be able to be able to be able to be now that you know the truth of who you really are, your body will heal very quickly. The tumors started shrinking before our eyes, and the doctors didn't even know what to make of it. You don't need an excuse to live the life that you were meant to live. Even having cancer didn't heal me from being a people-pleaser. It was death that healed me from that. Hi, I'm Biolik. And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

welcome to the last episode we ever will release of the breakdown because this one broke the mold. We don't need to do any other episodes ever again. News to me. I was ready to keep going. If you're not going to believe something, it would be this episode. And yet, there's more proof for this episode than any other. There's literally more scientific proof for an inexplicable, non-physical healing than we've ever heard of before. And what's amazing is, the person we're going to speak to has never heard of anyone with her story. Our guest today went from a stage 4B cancer diagnosis. Her family was told she had hours to live.

She ended up falling into a coma as a result of complete organ failure. And she had an experience that led to a month later being discharged from the hospital with no evidence of cancer in her body. How do you get from a turn? stage diagnosis of cancer to having an undetectable level of cancer a month later, an encounter that is out of this world, and indeed her consciousness left her body. And for almost two days, she was floating in another realm where it was not only communicated to her how she got cancer, but how she would be able to heal from cancer.

And that happened within a month of her opening her eyes and saying, I'm back. Just before we tell you who this guest is, if you haven't already subscribed to the channel, please do so. It helps us make the best possible show. An unbelievable statistic is less than 40% of people who listen to the channel regularly are subscribed. So please go ahead anywhere you're listening or watching. Click the little bell notification on YouTube if you're on YouTube and help us make this the best possible show. We're going to be speaking today to Anita Mourjani. She is a renowned author and spiritual speaker. Her New York Times bestseller, Dying to Be Me, My Journey from Cancer to Near

Death to True Healing. She was living in Hong Kong. She was raised in Hong Kong. She was battling end stage cancer. And she experienced a remarkable, and I would say, extremely, extremely unique near-death experience. She ended up writing about it for Dr. Jeffrey Long's website, N-D-E-R-F, the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation, and was essentially discovered. Not only was she told in her near-death experience why she got cancer and how to heal,

she was also shown a life that had nothing to do with the life that she was living. She had no idea how any of what she was shown would possibly come true and it has. Anita Morjani is an inspirational speaker and by her own admission has had an experience that no one seems to be able to clinically explain. It can only have happened from a non-physical transformation. We're going to hear all about what her life was like,

what the things were that led up to her getting cancer, what it was like to treat her cancer, what it was like to be told she would die, what it was like to come back from death, and heal and spend her life sharing her story. Anita Mourjani, such a pleasure to have you in person at the breakdown. Break it down. You have one of the most incredible transformational stories.

Tell us what your body was experiencing at the point that you had stage 4B cancer. So at that point, the doctors told my family that it was terminal. and my body was, my muscles were atrophying because my body was no longer absorbing nutrition. So I weighed about 85 pounds. My muscles were completely atrophied so I could no longer walk. I looked like a skeleton, but I did not have the strength to stand on my own legs. And even when I was sitting, like I would be on a wee, wheelchair, even when I was sitting, I didn't even have the strength in my neck to hold my head up.

My head would be hanging down. And my lungs were filled with fluid. I had open skin lesions that were weeping toxins. But the cancer, because it was lymphoma, it was lymphatic cancer, it caused tumors throughout my lymphatic system at all the lymph node points. And these tumors, many of them were the size of golf balls. So you could see them, these golf ball-sized tumors from the base of my skull around my neck, under my arms, in my chest, all the way down to my abdomen.

And because my lungs were filled with fluid, when I would lay flat, I would choke on my own fluid. I was going to the clinic every two or three weeks to have the fluid drained. I was also connected to an oxygen tank with the tube going in my nose and I had a portable tank. So basically I was in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank or lying in bed but propped up. Otherwise I would choke. But then on February the 2nd, 2006, I didn't wake up.

Yeah, I basically went into a coma. How many tumors are we talking about? Like when people think about the lymphatic system, they don't really know all the places that, like, I don't know how many lymphatic parts are there? Yes. So there's a, I mean, there's a lot of points, but I had at least six tumors. The size of golf balls, which is a significant size. It's a significant size. I had one here, a smaller one here. A big. pointing to by your neck. Yes.

Here. Here, one under each arm, a bigger one under this arm, actually. And then in the chest and one lodged like somewhere close to my lungs. So at least six that were significant. And the doctors are telling you and your family, this is the end, say goodbye. There's no medical intervention that's going to help you. Not at this point. Not at this point.

Absolutely not. And what happens in the body at this point that leads you to go into a coma is that basically your organs are not getting enough fluid, blood flow, nutrients to sustain life. Exactly. And now the organs are shutting down. So it started with my kidneys. The doctors told my parents, my mom and my husband and my brother that now my kidneys have shut down already.

and the other organs are starting to follow suit, and that there is just no nutrition in my body to heal it. There's not even enough nutrition to handle any kind of treatment. It's so far gone. And what was the journey up until that point? How many years or months had you been in this increasingly debilitated state going through, I would imagine, all kinds of medical interventions and attempts to get you, well and heal the cancer? Yes, so the journey was just under four years, about three years,

ten months for the whole journey. And in the beginning, it wasn't so bad, but it was one of those situations that I would get better and then it would come back and then I would try different treatments, including complementary. But then it reached this point where I started to nose diet. dramatically towards the end of 2005, that's when it started to nosedive dramatically. And that's when, because the doctors were starting to tell me, you probably only have three months to live. And I remember even hearing that impacted me greatly. And I started to feel there's no point fighting. There's no point living. And so on February the first, the evening of February 1st, I was so tired. I had been in so much pain and so much discomfort,

fighting just to stay alive, fighting just to breathe, because every breath was laborious. And every time if the oxygen tank was taken away or if I was getting up and trying to exert myself and just attempting to walk, I would be huffing and panting. Life was just living was laborious. so tired. I didn't think it was worth fighting for anymore. Based on this description that you've just given us, there is absolutely no clinical, medical, or physiological explanation for why you're here. Yes. I mean, would you say that that's accurate? I would, and several doctors have confirmed it after the fact, yes. One doctor has even described you being here as there has to be a non-physical explanation

for why you're here. Yes, yes, he did say that. He actually even said that I would put it down. He said, I'm not religious, but I can only put it down to divine intervention. That's what he said. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office. kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like,

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Make this the year you stop guessing about your health with superpower. Superpower. Not only did Superpower reduce their price to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional. additional $20 off with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. What I'm fascinated about is that we're going to get into what happened and this radical transformation that you underwent when life was too laborious where it became too hard and you stop breathing. I'm curious, though, to stay. still understand your mentality because this is someone who, as you described, it's three months,

three years and ten months of treatment, like remission, it coming back. And so like you're on a roller coaster. Before you had cancer the very first time, what was your life like? What was your mentality? What was your output? Were you a religious person? Like, who were you before this journey? So I grew up in Hong Kong and my parents are Indian, ethnically Indian. I met my husband Danny in Hong Kong who also happens to be Indian and we got married. And we have, I mean, my husband and I, we have a great relationship. However, before I met him, and I hadn't been married very long before I got diagnosed. But before I met him, I would say, my life was not that easy because my parents, being Indian, my dad was really strict as I was growing up.

And I was being groomed for an arranged marriage. But I went to a British school where all my classmates, all the other kids, the teachers, they were all British. So as I grew up as a teenager and into my late teens, all the other kids were thinking about which college they would go to or which university and their careers while I was being groomed for an arranged marriage. And I was told that, or I was discouraged from even thinking about a higher education because the smarter you are as a woman, the harder it is to get you married and to find you a suitable husband. Whereas I was someone who wanted my independence. I wanted to work. I wanted to earn my own money because we are expected to live with our parents and have our dads take care of us and not move out until we get

married and then our husbands take care of us. So when I said, I want to work, I want to travel, I want to do these things. I was told, oh, that will depend on your husband after you get married. So I basically grew up in a culture with a tremendous amount of gender disparity and I wasn't valued. and a woman's worth is measured by how valuable she is to the men in her community. So we grow up actually learning for our own survival to be subservient to the men around us. So that was my upbringing and with a very strict dad. So my entire life was spent trying to win his approval and trying to win the approval of the men in our community. and you get judged.

And so I grew up being a people pleaser. And I would call myself a doormat. And I wasn't religious per se, but I would say that I was totally open to spirituality. The reason I wasn't religious and yet completely open to all religions and spirituality is because growing up in Hong Kong, having Indian parents, British school, and Hong Kong being predominantly a Chinese city,

I was exposed to Christianity, to Hinduism, to Taoism, to Buddhism. And so I was just exposed and immersed in all of it. So I never followed any one religion, but I did respect all of them. And I did feel there was some truth in all of them. I also want to just sort of offer you the opportunity to sort of clarify. the notion is not that all Indian families, you know, produce people-pleaser daughters. As the grandchild of immigrants from Eastern Europe, it's very familiar to me, this notion of sort of being groomed, as you said, you know, to be obedient, to caretake, to be a caregiver.

And historically, for, you know, all of human history, women have kind of borne the brunt of this kind of emotional labor and physical labor in the home. I think it's important not to say that we're denigrating the Indian culture in particular, but this in families that tend to be patriarchal, that tend to be, you know, kind of centered around these kind of traditional gender roles, you will often see this kind of challenge, especially for women who are intelligent and independent and want to sort of break out of that. Yeah, thanks for actually giving me that opportunity. to clarify that. You're absolutely correct because when I go to India, I see amazing strong women heading up companies and living independent lives. But it seems to be more true for immigrants,

for the offspring of immigrants. Yes, you're right about that. Yeah. One of the interesting things about your life before you found the person who's become your life partner and you describe as your soulmate, you broke off an engagement. Yes. Which in my community as well can be very, very scandalous. Yeah. You know, once you are especially in the process of meeting with perspectives, it's seen as very untoward for a woman to decline an engagement, to make changes or alterations, or even to question the arrangement. So can you talk a little bit about what it was in you? that was already sort of brewing in terms of you being able to assert yourself, because I think it does connect to your later story.

When I was in my early 20s, at first I was rebelling against the arranged marriage. I refused to have an arranged marriage. And just to put into context, I was so immersed in British culture because of the other kids at school. I was into British pop culture. I was into Cindy Lauper. So I didn't want an arranged marriage. But then all my British friends went off to university and went to follow their careers.

My Indian friends all had arranged marriages. Starting at age 17, I started losing all my Indian friends one by one. By the time I was 21, I was really lonely. And so I agreed to giving it a chance. And that's when I started to get introduced to prospective grooms. and eventually I did agree and say yes to someone and then we were engaged. It was only after we were engaged did the reality of what the rest of my life would be like start to hit me. So over the months I was literally being trained on how to cook certain foods, traditional foods,

in the way they needed to be cooked and to dress a certain way. and all the finer details. I was literally being groomed. And also how to follow our Hindu religion about going to the temple and how many times a week. I never really went to the temple even though I was Hindu in name.

But now I was expected to go to the temple. So I was literally being groomed for this life that lay ahead of me where I would be living with the groom and his parents, his family, basically. And as we got closer to the wedding, I got, I started to really get scared that this was it. And I started to talk to the family, my future husband's family, to say I would like to go back to school because I didn't finish school. It was an absolute no.

I said I would like to work, even if it's part time. It was an absolute no. So I started to get really afraid for my future. and I thought this is it. I'm in my 20s and I have nothing to look forward to. One day, three days before the wedding, and I don't always share this part, but I went and cried on my mother's shoulders.

And I told her that I'm so scared. I can't go through with it. My mom said, it's okay. You don't have to go through with it. That was such a relief. So I actually ran away. but only my mom knew where I was. So I ran away three days before the wedding,

and it really upset everybody, because if you know anything about Indian weddings, they're huge affairs. It's days and days and days. Yes, so everything was booked. All the venues were booked, the bands, the food, the videographers, the relatives had all flown in with the gifts. And it was...

How many people are we talking about from all over the world that are coming? Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds. Hundreds of people. And there's a different outfit that you wear sometimes several different outfits a day. Like it's a very large.

And all these other people have brought all their outfits, all their fancy. I don't know why the first thing I think of is like, you come to a wedding and it's like, I brought 17 outfits and she didn't even show up. I know. Exactly. So three days, everyone is there already or like, or they're still in progress of? Everyone, most of the people are there. They're already there.

They've brought wedding gifts and. And I mean, everything is booked. The bands, the food, the hotel rooms, the venues, that everything, the honeymoon. It's all booked and done. I'm just fascinated about, like, the moment you decide to run away and, like, is it at night? Are you, like, evading people so that they can't, like, spot you walking out the door? It's like Shakespearean. Yeah.

How do you escape? Like, what is that moment where, where are you when you decide to run away? And then, like, literally the physical act of, like, escaping. How does that work? So I phoned up a friend who is not a relative, but very close friend, because we knew that nobody would think of finding me there at her house. They would think I was at home or with a relative. And she came with her partner, her boyfriend, and they picked me up and they whisked me

away to her home, which was a little further away, quite a few miles away from where all the activity was taking place where all the families were. Did you have to go at night? Was it like a black car? Like did you have to have like a robe over you to like get, I'm imagining it like a prison break movie where you are like in the linen? No, fortunately, no, fortunately it wasn't that dramatic because at that time nobody suspected anything. So it just looked like maybe I was going out or something, but but I wasn't planning to come back. You didn't have like a suitcase with you. You kind of left without.

We did put a bunch of things in the trunk of her car. Yes. Wow. Did you tell the fiancé? So prior to me even running away, I called him because I wanted to talk to him. And this is the part that I've never shared this publicly, but I guess there's a time when one has to do this. I called him because I felt we needed to talk. He had a temper and I was afraid of him and he was reminding me too much of my dad.

And I was scared to go through this with him. And I wanted to talk to him about it before actually turning up at the temple for the wedding. I was told I could not see him. I had to just show up at the temple. How many times had you met before you were even engaged? We had met very few times, not that many and we weren't allowed to meet much. kept being told. You were never alone with him, correct? Maybe, hardly ever, maybe once, twice at the most. But we were told, don't worry, everything will sort itself out after you're married.

So when I said, I need to talk to him, because when I talk to him on the phone, he seems irritable, bad-tempered, and I'm about to marry this man, I need to see him face to face. I want to look into his eyes and feel that he does care for me and that I'm going to be. be happy. And I was told that you can do all that after you're married, just show up at the temple. So I tried calling him. He wouldn't talk to me on the phone. He was very abrupt. And then I said to my mom, when I cried and cried, and I said, if I can't see him, I'm not going to show up at the temple. And that was three days away. And my mom said, I'm with you. I'm with you. I agree with you. She didn't know half of what was happening on the conversations. She said,

her reaction was, why didn't you tell me earlier? Oh. So then she, so she helped me get out. And she said, I will handle it. I will tell his family because he was not talking to me properly. When I started, you know, reading your story, I realized like your mom is in many ways kind of like, co-heroine of this story because, you know, I think about my own parents. My father tried to back out of the wedding days before and his mother said to him, take a nap, you'll feel better. And he took a nap and then he felt better. But apparently when he called my mother to say, I don't think I can go through with it, she said, fine, fuck you and hung up on it. She was 18 at the time. When I think about both of my grandmothers and the culture that I come from, it's very, very

rare to find a woman who will say to a daughter in that situation, I've got you. You know what I mean? Like there's not many options, even for women of your mother's generation, to have the wherewithal to say, you don't have to go through with this arranged marriage. I'm going to protect you. It's enormous. It is enormous. I was so grateful for her.

And I wouldn't have been able to do it. So had my mother not sided with me, I would have gone through with it. And also, you know, all of this is sort of part of your journey, your path, which is revealed to you years later, you know, in a very specific way. Once you break that engagement, you ended up sort of rebuilding a life. You end up meeting this man who you fell in love with. It was a love match, as we call it. And you started building a life together. but there's a few people in your life who you experience some tragedy with that also is part of your

story. Can you talk a little bit about what you encountered adjacent to a few specific health-related traumas? So my best friend who I grew up with, we were the same age, she was diagnosed with cancer, what seemed like out of the blue. And she had been healthy and vibrant. And then she just found herself huffing and puffing going up and downstairs. And so she went for a checkup, and they found a tumor lodged between her lungs. And it turned out to be quite serious. It needed surgery immediately. And then it was, it was actually diagnosed as an aggressive cancer. and that came as a shock to me almost as big a shock as if I received the diagnosis because we were so close and she was like a sister to me and she had two small children.

I didn't have children. So she had little children and I couldn't believe that she was going through this. And what ended up happening is that just because probably the way I was brought, brought up, I ended up almost neglecting my life just to help her. And, you know, and I was doing things for her kids. I was basically feeling guilty if I went out and had fun while she was in the hospital getting her treatments. I could not go out with my friends. I couldn't go shopping because going out with my friends, it made me feel like she was missing because she was part of the group of friends and it just didn't feel right to go without her. So I literally gave up

my own life during that time that she was sick and started to neglect my own home. And then my husband's brother-in-law, same age, also was diagnosed with an aggressive form. of cancer. So I was watching this happen around me. And as I was watching, I became so fearful of cancer. And then I started researching cancer prevention. And so I became obsessed because these two people, my age, healthy, I became obsessed with trying to avoid getting cancer. I started to order everything I could online to, you know, antioxidants. and supplements to prevent getting cancer. I started to follow an anti-cancer diet.

And I'm someone who loves chocolate. I have a sweet tooth. I gave up eating sugar, and I gave up eating a lot of my favorite foods just because I was on this anti-cancer diet. And my life just felt so small and limited and fearful because here I was on an anti-cancer diet. because here I was on an anti-cancered diet

at the same time watching two people I love deteriorate. It's impossible to not think of our conversation we had with Gabour Matte in his book, The Myth of Normal, talks about one of the hardest things for people to hear, which is that what physicians have noted for hundreds and hundreds of years, is that by and large, meaning not in every case, but by and large, there are certain personality, features that tend to group with certain diagnoses. And, you know, when we talked about this with

Gabor Mate, I said to Jonathan, I don't even know if I want to talk about this, because it's so painful, especially for any of us who have been ill, have lost someone to cancer in particular, for people listening who might be struggling with cancer themselves. But what Gabor Mate talked about is something that people who tend to live for other people and be caregivers and suppress their needs in place of others' needs, and people who tend to be on this kind of fearful and anxious spectrum, oftentimes you will see a cancer diagnosis.

And it's just so, I can't even, it's like I can't even articulate it because there are many people with those features who don't get cancer. That's absolutely true. And to caveat, there's a lot of environmental issues and toxins that people get exposed to that are outside of that realm. So if we're isolating the variables and we're just thinking about people who have no other reason or exposure or issue, then there's this overwhelming similarity. But also, how do you frame that? Because no one wants to believe that they gave themselves cancer. No one wants to walk around. And

saying, I did this to myself. What was your framework? So, of course, at the time, I never would have thought I gave this to myself. But let me tell you something that speaks volumes. So while I was caregiving for my friend and I wasn't even able to live my own life, one day I felt a lump here. and I went to the doctor and the first thing the doctor said was, oh, it's your lymph glands, it's a cyst. Actually, it said it's your lymph glands. You must be fighting an infection. Let's put you on antibiotics for a bit and see if it goes down.

It didn't go down. And at that time, it was very common to prescribe antibiotics for anything. So, yeah, everything. Today I'm reluctant to do that. But it didn't disappear because they said, give it three weeks. It didn't disappear. So that's when they said, oh, we'll have. have to do a biopsy. It looks like a cyst will do a biopsy. They did a biopsy, and the biopsy came back

showing that it, and then they did the scan and saw it had spread down to here, my upper left quadrant. So the first, the biopsy confirmed that it was lymphoma. The scan confirmed that it had spread to the upper left quadrant. So they said, you have stage two Hodgkin's lymphoma. It should have freaked me out because I was so scared of the cancer. But here's a secondary emotion that I actually noticed. I felt, oh, now I get to take care of my own life. And see, I'm getting goosebumps, even when I remember that moment. And now I was able to tell people, sorry, I can't do this, because I have to go for my treatment. I have to go do this for myself. I have to rest. I have to do this.

There's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David's mother dies and, you know, obviously this is a comedic turn, but he was so excited that he now had a reason to say no to people. That when people would ask him to do things because, you know, this character on Curb Your Enthusiasm,

he famously doesn't like doing things. And he was like, oh, I can't go to that benefit. My mom died. And it's funny because you're laughing because it's so absurd, but you talk about this that if there is any element of relief when you are diagnosed with something that I can finally take care of myself, I can finally say no, I can finally rest. That's an indication that you're

not essentially living the life that you're supposed to be living. Yep, that is a huge indication. You don't need an excuse to live the life that you were meant to live. You don't need. Don't wait for the excuse. That's why I share my story. Oh, yeah. And interestingly, you mentioned Gabor Mate, because when my book, Dying to Be Me, came out eventually, he actually heard of it and read it and reached out to me. And he said that he wrote a book called When the body says no, and he said, you're exactly the kind of person that I'm talking about. Well, I'm curious now. we started the cancer journey where you get diagnosed and how does that go for you in terms of your emotional world, your psychological world, what changes during those initial phases of cancer

and sort of what is the trajectory obviously to get you three years and 10 months later? In the beginning, I didn't really look sick. So I was still able to still continue with a lot of the activities. Later, when I went in the coma, I, I, I could. got a lot of clarity. Everything that I was doing, I was still doing from a place of a fear of cancer. So even every treatment, every food I was eating, every supplement, I was on a boatload of supplements and I was on a very strict diet because everything, I was still researching how to get rid of cancer. And I wasn't doing things because, oh, now I really do want to take care of myself. I do love myself. I had a reason now to say no to people, but everything I was doing

came from the fear of the cancer and the fear of death, every activity, everything I ate, everything I put in my mouth. And obviously when you're fighting for your life, right? Yes. You know, it's hard to sort of step back and say, I love myself. I'm nourishing my body. Like this medicine is it. It's very hard to do that because the huge. human experience is one of fear of suffering, fear of pain, fear of death. And especially at the time when you were dealing with this, we still, cancer was still this kind of large, it is a large looming fear. There's so much uncertain about it. Yes, it is. And so I had this fear around me and what made it worse was that I was watching these two people, my best friend and my husband's

brother-in-law getting, their health was deteriorating. So there I was determined not to let that happen to me. Neither of them were integrating complementary medicine. So I was the one that was throwing myself into that. I was doing Iroveda, I was doing yoga. So they were deteriorating. And then when my best friend died, I was devastated. Even then, even though I was taking care of myself, when people were offering to help me, when people were seeing that I was deteriorating, I would not let them help me. I would keep saying, no, I'm fine, I'm okay. People would offer to drive me or cook food for us, because my husband, as I deteriorated and as I got worse and worse, my husband stopped going to work full time and he was helping to care for me.

Other people would step in and I was still always saying, no, I don't want to trouble them. I don't want to bother them. And so I was still pushing them away because I didn't want to be a bother to anyone. one of the things that I realized later in hindsight that even having cancer didn't heal me from being a people pleaser. It was death that healed me from that. You did embark on a journey. You went, I don't want to call it home because your home was obviously Hong Kong,

but you went to India and you, for a period of time, immersed yourself in Ayurvedic principles, and diet and kind of the customs of that cultural healing modality, which is very, very powerful, something interesting happened in that you started to feel better. Yes, I did. And when you were immersed in that community and that culture of Ayurveda, that you felt that something was resonating. And when you went back to Hong Kong, which is a much more diverse in terms of cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, spiritual practices. You felt that there was something that happened when you got

back to Hong Kong that was not as supportive as what you were doing when you were in India. Can you describe a little bit about what you talk about in terms of the confusion that your body experienced? I did Ayurveda, Ayurvedic medicine, where I was following a complete Ayurvedic diet and I was doing the yoga postures and I was following a yoga master. and at that time I was being told that don't even think of the word cancer. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Pretend it doesn't exist because the yoga masters were saying in actuality, it doesn't exist.

Every disease is just an imbalance in your body. So what we're going to do is we're going to fix the imbalance. And I loved that way of thinking. It really resonated with me. So I immersed myself in that and I felt incredible. I did feel all the lymph nodes start to soften and go down and I was feeling so much better. I was doing yoga. I was eating differently because they gave me, you see, when I was doing it myself in Hong Kong,

I was so scared of everything I was eating. Here, now the fear was actually gone. Now I was really eating nutritious food where I could now eat. eat dairy. I had stopped eating dairy. I was able to eat sugar again because in Ayurvedic diet, you're supposed to eat sweet, sour, salty, you're supposed to have the full range of flavors. So I was eating so much better. I was gaining some weight and so I wasn't as emaciated. And I was looking better, feeling better and emotionally and mentally much better. and I was looking forward to a future.

And it showed in my body, in my health, in my energy. So then when I was in that space for about six months, I thought, okay, I'm good now. I'm going to take this, what I've learned, back with me to Hong Kong because I'm missing my home. I'm missing my dog. Danny had come out to see me twice while I was there. So I went back home and, of course, all my friends wanted to know how I was doing. and I love my friends, but I was back in that community. My best friend hadn't passed away yet,

but she had missed me tremendously and my brother-in-law. And so I was back in that community of cancer and hospitals and watching two people die, and they started to ask me, where are you at with your treatment? They used the word cancer. They used the word cancer. It all came back, and are you going for your checkups? And I said, no, I've been going for this Iovation.

though, I'm going to go back there for the follow-ups. And they said, oh, gosh, that's not, that's pseudoscience. That's woo-woo. You don't want to do that. You don't, you need to go to a real doctor. And here I am watching what's happening around me. All the fear came back. And I felt myself getting worse again, getting back into that. It's like, almost like felt like my environment was shaping me. You also talk about how there was something about the consistency that you found when you were in India that was not present when you got back to Hong Kong. And it's something that I think a lot of our listeners can relate to, especially anyone who's had an autoimmune diagnosis or a diagnosis that kind of jumps around where you keep trying to find the thing. You keep trying to find the treatment, the supplement,

the guru, the medication, the meditation. And there's something about the confusion that comes from jumping from place to place, that when you removed yourself from that, you found some more clarity. Yes. Yes. So when I was in India, there was no conflict. I was immersed in Ayurveda. I was immersed in one culture, one way of eating that was helping me, that this culture knew was healing and nourishing. And my mind was satisfied, my soul, my spirit. But when I was in Hong Kong, because I was exposed to Eastern and Western, Western naturopathic, Western medicine, Eastern naturopathic, where certain foods were considered healthy in one culture were considered cancer-causing in another culture.

So even during my time in Hong Kong, I had known about Ayurveda, but in Western naturopathy, I was told that sugar and dairy causes cancer. it messes with your hormones so you've got to cut that out but whereas in India it was fine to do that but when I was in this melting pot of cultures it was so confusing that no matter what I ate somebody was telling me that's bad for you so I felt I was doomed no matter what I did or what I ate the other thing that was happening is that when I was having Western treatment the naturopathic, the people, the naturopaths were telling me, your body is already dealing with something toxic, it's dealing with cancer. You don't want to weaken it by putting more toxins.

Do you know that chemotherapy, you know, kills all your white blood cells? And I was getting an earful of that. When I was with the medical people, they were saying, oh, all that naturopathic stuff is pseudoscience. You can't go in that direction. So I just couldn't win. And I mean, and I have learned so much from going through that and feeling that fear and feeling that no matter what I do, I'm going to be feeling fear. It was so hard to climb out of that fear. And we know from a medical perspective that the mindset of the person has a biological impact. We know that the mindset of the doctor administering treatments can also have an impact on the efficacy. Yes. Thank you for taking us.

through kind of these years of the journey because you know it's one thing for us to kind of come in hot and be like you had cancer and now you're alive that's not the whole story you've given us you know some of the introduction here into how you arrived at a cancer diagnosis that had progressed to stage four B yeah you are given essentially a terminal diagnosis yes there are no more treatments or interventions that can be administered, even if they could be, your body does not have the strength to sustain. Yes. You know, even finding a vein, right, being put through any of these treatments.

You went into organ failure. Yes. Which is a progressive, you know, process. You went into organ failure and you fell into a coma. Yes. The unbelievable and miraculous part of your story is that your consciousness was sustained throughout your coma? Yes, it was.

When was the first moment that you realized that you were present even though your body was not? While I was lying on the hospital bed, my physical body was lying on the hospital bed and I started to notice that I wasn't feeling any more pain. And it felt as though

my breathing wasn't laborious anymore. But it's, I didn't notice that I probably didn't even need to breathe because when you're not your physical body, you don't need to breathe. But I noticed that suddenly I was feeling light and the pain was just gone. The discomfort of not being able to breathe. It was just gone. And the fear was gone. But at the same time, I was aware that my family around me, were distraught because, and then I could hear what they were saying. And I didn't know that I was in a coma. I thought I was awake and I was hearing all this. But I had no idea that my eyes were closed. I was in a coma and they were talking about me while I was in a coma. I didn't realize at first.

It took a little while for me to realize because I wanted to communicate with my family who was so distraught. I wanted to say, hey, wait, I'm actually feeling better. I'm feeling fine. I feel really good. What's going on? And that's when I started to realize, oh, I'm not exactly in my body anymore. And that's when I started to become aware something is happening. I want to give the PS before we go back and go into the experience that you had. The PS is what you're about to describe that happened led to a transformation so significant and enormous that you eventually were discharged from the hospital with an essentially undetectable level of cancer. Yes.

Within a matter of five weeks? Five weeks. Three to five. Actually, it was three weeks that they could no longer find it, but they still kept me there. They said, we're going to keep looking because cancer doesn't disappear like that. You haven't met Anita. So with that framework, there's something that happened. How long were you in the coma?

Just over 30 hours. So not even two days, a little over a day. And you had a cohesive experience of existing as your consciousness outside of your body. Yes. Can you give us a few. examples that would support the notion that consciousness does not reside in the body or in the mind. So one of the things is that I heard my husband talk to the doctor, where the doctor was telling my husband that these are her final hours. She won't even make it through the night. I didn't realize.

I actually saw him telling my husband that I saw them face to face, but they were actually. outside the room and they were down the hall at the nurse's station, which was later verified. I was aware of things like while I was in the coma, the doctors were taking fluid out of my lungs. And the nurses were trying to find veins to put tubes into. So I was aware of all of this happening. I was even aware that my brother, who was in India at the time, was trying to get to the airport to get on a flight to get to me before I actually died. But nobody had told me that, but I was aware. It was like I could see him, but I used the word see loosely because we don't have eyes.

So it's like a 360 degree peripheral vision awareness, but it's beyond the hospital room that I was in. Now, some people might be thinking, I'm just going to say it. Some people might be like, well, I don't know what Hong Kong medicine was like when she was in the hospital because she must have not been in a coma. Right? Yeah. It must have not been in a coma.

But this is a modern, progressive facility. Yes. And there are very specific markers. that we use clinically to say this person is in a coma. It's usually a lifting of the eyelids. There's pupil stuff they do, the light, just like if you've seen any TV show where they're like, are they alive?

This is not a new designation of physiological existence that we don't know about. You were clinically in a coma. You should not have been hearing anything. You should not have been experiencing anything, nor should you be able to recount the volumes of information that you came back with knowledge of. Yes, and the hospital I was at, it was one of the top hospitals or cancer hospitals in Hong Kong. And one of the doctors who has actually come on to my YouTube channel to speak, Dr. Brian Walker, he's British, he's Scottish.

and he was my doctor at the time. And he just came on it to give me credibility so that people could see that it really did happen. And he was there throughout the whole thing. So tell us about the moment you realize that you are not in your body. At that moment when I started to become aware that, hey, I'm feeling pretty good. That's when I started to realize, like, I'm feeling pretty good.

And it's because you don't have a body. Yeah. And I noticed that my breathing wasn't labored, the pain was gone. And that's when I realized that I was not in the body. But then it didn't end there. The biggest thing I noticed was that the fear was gone, the fear of death, the fear of the cancer, the fear of the treatments. That fear was gone. It was just gone.

it was, that was huge for me because you don't realize how big or how deep that fear is when you're in it. But when it's gone, you notice the void. It's kind of like when you're in a room with an air conditioner and you don't notice the sound of the air conditioner. But when it goes off, you're like, oh, wow, that was loud. In that state, I realized, wow, I had been. living in so much fear. And not just from the cancer, long before the cancer. That's when that clarity hit me. But you like do a metaphorical cartwheel once you're realized, hey, I'm just hanging out here. Like, maybe it's not linear time. It's not. I mean, I think that's sort of what I wanted to

to get to is that what ended up kind of evolving and it's, it kind of came in waves from the way you describe it. Yes. Is that you kept feeling kind of an emotional connection to things going on. And then you kept like pulling away is the way you described it. You kept kind of pulling away and getting farther, right? From anything concrete. So there's something and other near-death experiencers have described. You know, some of this and certain psychedelic experiences also have mimicked, you know,

certain aspects of the way you describe it, you were flooded with a sense of awareness and freedom and an astounding clarity. Can you talk about that before we get to love? It was like I understood why I was there lying in that hospital bed. I understood why I had got cancer. I actually understood for the first time, as much as we hate saying we caused it, I understood how I had allowed my body to get cancer. It's a hard one. I'm not blaming the victim here. It's never anybody's fault when they're sick, but I could see the trajectory of my life and I could see all the points in my life, the thoughts, the decisions I'd made that led to this point of me lying there on that hospital bed. Was it like a life review, like snapshots? How did the information come to you?

So it was like a life review. And here's where mine is a little weird and different because when people talk about a life review, you know, because one thing is I could feel everything my family who could feel, which I could. I was feeling everything. You felt like you'd be. became people. Yes, I became them. I could feel how distraught my family was. I could feel the hopelessness of the doctors. I could see my doctor Walker, who is my family physician. He was, he felt hopeless, and I could feel it. And my mom was holding on to his arm saying, isn't there anything else we can do? And I could feel my mom was wishing that it was her instead of me. You know, I could. I could feel all of these things. At the same time, I could see everything in my life that caused me

to get to this point and where other people often talk about all the places where they hurt other people and they could feel the hurt of the other person. What I was seeing was where I had been hurt my entire life, where other people had hurt me or where I had allowed myself to be hurt because I didn't accept help. I didn't say no. I was always the people pleaser. I was always there for everybody. I let everybody cry on my shoulder,

even when I didn't have the bandwidth or the time. So I could see how I had downtrodden myself or allowed myself to be hurt. So it was my own pain that I was seeing an entire trajectory of. And so, wow, that's what led me to this point. That's how I squashed my little, spirit and soul right down.

You're describing a version of what some people might describe as hell, but you weren't experiencing it necessarily as reliving the pain. You were gaining a clarity of the trajectory of your life that led to subsequent hurts over and over so that the feeling that you were left with was, now I understand. Yes. Not, oh my God, my life was horrible. No, it was a, now I understand.

Now I understand. It was really, that was the big emotion, the clarity, the, oh, I get it now. Why didn't I know this before? Why didn't I know that it's okay to stand up for myself? Why didn't I know I'm not a bad person if I speak out? Why didn't I know I'm not a bad person for having run away from that marriage? because I really, my family had been ostracized for that. I was told no one would marry me after what I'd done.

So, you know, internally, we're beating ourselves up. I didn't know that I'm not a bad person. You were able to get in touch or something touched you that communicated basically what became your entire philosophy and life journey from the time that you had this experience until now. can you describe what the next level of feeling was? The next level of feeling was that I actually, for the first time, realized that I am incredibly powerful. I mean, we all are, but I had never known this, and I didn't know why this was hidden from me, from us.

from everybody, I just realized, wow, we come in with this incredible power. We have all this energy. Energy is the only word I can think of or soul. We have this incredible powerful energy or soul at our disposal to express through this physical body, and we don't know how powerful it is. So I use the term magnificent. I realized that I am an amazing magnificent being. And we all have access to that. But people just don't know it. Talk about what the source of that is for you. The source of it is, I call it the all that is.

It is the collective of everything that has ever lived, everything that is yet to live, every life form. Recently, I've been using an analogy of a mirror ball. It's like every single soul. not just on this planet, but even off planet, because I'm sure there are probably beings on other planets and other... Of course. Yes, there has to be, yes.

But every single life form is a life form. And we're all connected. And that's what I realized. When we don't have these physical bodies, there is no hard boundary to separate you from me. That's why I feel, when I'm not in my body, I feel... feel what you're feeling and you feel what I'm feeling if you're not in your body. People who are empaths are less in their body. They feel what other people are feeling. And so we don't realize it because we believe we are just these physical bodies, but we are so much more that's actually

bigger than the body, but we don't see it. And that part of us is connected with everyone else. We could say it's connected with strings or with waves, but we are all connected. And because we're all connected together, totally, we are the all that is. We are one. And I felt so connected to that. Talk about the experience you had of love. And I think the hardest thing, you know, is for you to describe something that is indescribable. but you talk about sort of what your experience was of unconditional love.

What was that like? So for the first time, I felt like I was enveloped in this feeling of unconditional love. And it was a feeling of I was loved just because I exist. I didn't have, for the first time that I can remember, I realized that I didn't have to do anything. to feel loved. I didn't have to be anything. I didn't have to try any harder. I didn't have to please anyone. I didn't have to win anyone over. I was loved just because I existed. So it felt like for the first time I could actually relax. I wasn't acting, performing, trying to win someone over. I'd spent a

lifetime doing that. And that feeling was so beautiful and refreshing and yet alien. It felt so new to me. And so what I noticed was that with the absence of fear, that void was filled with this feeling of just love. In this feeling, you feel safety, you feel trust, you feel that you can just completely relax and be yourself. And you're not going to be judged. You're not going to be shamed. For me, shame was a big one throughout my life. One of the things that you described was that it didn't feel like a dream. It felt like you had been dreaming your entire existence and you had finally woken up. Like movies like The Matrix, right, talk about what would it be like to sort of pull the veil back and see the nature of our true existence. Can you describe

sort of what that felt like? It felt like I had woken up from the dream. You know how sometimes when you have you're having a bad dream and you're so relieved when you wake up that it was just a dream. That's what it felt like. It felt like, oh, wow, that was just a dream. Oh, my God. I'm not, you know, I'm not in all that pain and all that fear. It felt like such a relief and it felt so real. And the clarity, the understanding made it feel like this is reality.

This is the truth. not that what I was living. Did you go to heaven? That's a great question. And it depends on what one believes heaven is. And the second thing I want to say is that my own interpretation of heaven is that I believe heaven is a state of being and not a place. And so I believe I was in that state where it was just. incredible. And I don't want to undermine anybody's religious beliefs. I'm very respectful of

everybody's beliefs, but I always feel that I just need to qualify what I mean when I say things. Do you believe in a divine intervention or just this collective love consciousness? I believe in a collective love consciousness, but that's what I call. the divine. In other words, I don't, I don't see God as a being that is outside of us, but I see God as a source of divine energy that we can commune with. That we commune with. Right. That we commune with. And we express this energy through us as well. My children call that cheating. When I tell them that's like my conception of God. Only because all religions have personified God in a way that is not that.

And even beyond personification, but that like, oh, there's the reward and there's punishment. And it's like, no, it's like breath. And it's like, yeah, right. There's no reward. All reward punishment. All that's a here thing, not a there thing. Do you think that the earth is an experiment for souls to come and learn lessons and that this is all sort of some simulation as you talk about waking up?

It could be. I, you know, I think that we came here as part of our evolution, the soul's evolution. But I think that, I don't even think that, I know that from the perspective of being beyond the body, we do a lot of really stupid things here. I don't know. We spend our time worrying about a lot of things that I think you've experienced are simply not as important as we think they are. And causes harm. For example, from that perspective, let's say from the perspective of where we go to and we die and you look back, it seems crazy that we still have wars.

It seems crazy that we still think we can kill people. Nobody has the right to kill other people. It's crazy the amount of resources and money we use to kill people and how little we use to help and feed people. All of this, when we look back on our lives, we will see, you know, even the amount of time we just spend chasing after stuff just to compete for no other reason, but just to feel like we're ahead of everybody. All these things make no sense from the other realm. So is the other realm like, hey, how come they can't get it? Or they're patient and they're like, well, they're going to learn and evolve and they're hopefully going to bring this conscientious. to Earth. My sense is that from the other realm and what I sensed while I was there, it's like, let's see if we can help them get this sooner.

Because that's where I think it's a little bit like a game designed or an experiment designed to see if these humans can absorb and integrate this consciousness from the other realm. If there are, for lack of a better word, puppet masters on the other side, hoping that we will wake up. Yes, they're hoping that we will wake up. They're trying to help us wake up. So we have free will. They're not going to control us. They're not going to make us do anything. They're not going to annihilate us. We all have free will. But they are there hoping that we will wake up. They're there to help us wake up. They're not there to punish us, but they're there to guide us and push us to

wake up. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about what you sort of encountered? And then I want to kind of get to what it was like to know that you were going to be returned to your body and what that choice was like? I did encounter. My dad had passed away 10 years prior, my best friend who had passed away. I did sense them around me. Their essences, so like they don't have physical bodies, but I did feel their presence around me guiding me through this process. And one thing that felt incredible to me like a huge relief was that I felt nothing but unconditional love from them and particularly my dad who I had always felt was disappointed in me and so but now I felt this unconditional love from him and that felt really good.

Was there a bit of a push and pull between being aware of your family, members in the earth plane and the experience of being aware of people on the non-earth plane? Like, how did you sort of divide attention because you have a lot of very detailed understanding of what's happening in the hospital as well? Like, how did that work? So in the beginning, as I was in the early stage of being in the coma, I was a little bit more here than there. In terms of awareness. In terms of awareness. And I, and I, I was being drawn by what was happening here in the physical and feeling for them more. But then I started to get pulled away and I would get pulled away and then pulled back and then pulled away.

But each time I was going further and further away from the physical. So I was, I started to become less and less aware of my family in the physical. And that's when I started to become more aware of things that were happening in the non-physical. And there was also a feeling of they're going to be okay. They're going to be okay. And whether that being okay meant that I was going to die and one day they will join me in the future or whatever it meant I didn't know.

But it was just a feeling that it's okay. You don't have to worry about them. So if I understand it, it's like I'm concerned because all of a sudden you're having this huge empathic awareness of what they're going through it. But at a certain point, she goes into a coma and that which is going on. Yes, but in that coma state,

you're like, oh, I'm really aware of everyone. I want to make sure they're okay. You probably feel the intensity of their grief and despair a lot. But the more you move away from that, the more almost intergalactic or otherworldly your experience becomes and also the more love you have for them

knowing that it's like an interesting separation, right? It's like you don't have to take care of them. There's nothing you can do and they're going to be okay. So as you're feeling more love, you're actually giving them more love and separating from not, I don't want to pathologize it by saying codependent, but maybe a highly empathic response instead of feeling their pain. Now you're sending love to them, knowing that they're going to be okay. Do you then have a moment of realization about, oh, if I go too far here, like, what about that?

Am I leaving that behind? Is there a concern about? about, you know, your body and what's happening? Or are you just immersed in the love? And you're like, I'm just going to stay here forever. Is there an understanding of time? She's experiencing her consciousness outside of her body. It's like tripping balls to like the millionth level.

Like she's not, it's not a cognitive thing like that. She's like feeling the universe. Every now and again, you're feeling the universe. You're like, wait a second. I used to like that body over there. Am I ever going to return to it? So, but my body was so sick. And my family had been suffering.

part of me wanted to go back into that body because even though I loved my family, I truly believe that leaving my body was the best thing for them as well. I did actually believe that. I hate to do this, but we're going to hit pause here. This is a critical point in Anita's story, but we have so much more to cover and we will cover it in part two. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss part two. And for more, check out Mind Be Alex breakdown on Substack, where we release exclusive content, not released anywhere else, and join the breaker community. In part two, we're going to hear literally what happens when Anita came back into her body,

what she saw in the room, what she communicated, and what the medical journey was like to try and detect what happened to her cancer. We're going to talk about what happened once she was released from the hospital, the life she began to live, the loneliness she started to experience and how she began to connect again with a much larger audience, as it were, than she ever thought she would be able to have access to. She's also going to talk about literally what she brought back from the experience, what undoing aspects of your life means, what a concept of unconditional love actually looks like, and how to deepen your intuition, and what it means to tap into intuitive ability, what does it actually

mean to raise your vibrational frequency. How does she believe that helped her heal? And how does she teach others to help them heal as well? We're so excited for you to hear Part 2. So please make sure you're subscribed. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's MyN Be all X breakdown.

She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.