Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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Welcome to Insights at the Edge. Our special guest today, Anita Moorjani. About six months ago, I was talking to Michael Beckwith, the reverend of the Agape Church, and we were talking about out-of-body experiences. And he could tell that I was really interested and I had a lot of questions, and he said to me, “Tami, you have got to meet Anita Moorjani.” And that moment is happening now here on Insights at the Edge. Anita, welcome. And I’m going to say a little bit more about you. But first, welcome.
Anita Moorjani: Thank you. And I just want to say it’s an honor to be here and to meet you finally.
TS: Anita has an absolutely remarkable story, and she tells it in her New York Times bestseller, Dying to Be Me. I’m going to summarize here in four sentences, and then we’re going to have the opportunity to dive deep and experience the essence of the story through Anita’s telling, and then also see where it’s taken her over the last ten-plus years.
OK, here’s my four sentences. After a four-year battle with cancer, Anita fell into a coma and was given days to live. As her doctors gathered to revive her, she journeyed into a near death experience where she was given a choice: to return to her physical form or continue in this new realm. She chose the former—I guess I could add—obviously. And when she regained consciousness—now this really is quite remarkable—her cancer began to heal. To the amazement of her doctors, she was free of countless tumors and cancer indicators within weeks.
Dying to Be Me is a book that came out in 2012 and—ready for this?—has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into 45 languages. Anita’s subsequent books include What if This Is Heaven? and a new book. It’s about the power of empaths in an increasingly harsh world. It’s called Sensitive Is the New Strong.
OK, Anita, here’s where I’d love to start. I’m sure you’ve told the story of your near death experience so many times that it’s probably become legend in your own mind. But please take us there, if you will. Take us into the experience.
AM: OK, it’s a great place to start. So basically, I was in my final hours of life. The doctors told my family at this point—so the point where I’m starting is when the doctors told my family that I wasn’t even going to make it through the night because I was already in a coma. My physical body had gone into a coma. And at that point, after having cancer for four years—it was lymphoma, lymphatic cancer. I had tumors, many of them the size of golf balls, from the base of my skull, all around my neck, down under my arms, in my chest, and all the way down to my abdomen.
At that point, my body had stopped absorbing nutrition. And so I had been losing weight, and my muscles had become completely atrophied because there was no nutrition in my body. So I looked like a skeleton. I weighed about 85 pounds, and I’m 5’4″. And I was so weak that I wasn’t able to stand up, and this was before I went into the coma. I wasn’t even able to stand up and hold my own weight up. And even when I was sitting, I couldn’t hold my head up. My head was always hanging down on my neck. Even my neck didn’t have the strength to hold my head up, but I had these great tumors around my neck.
My lungs were filled with fluid. So when I would lie down and I would lie flat, I would choke on my own fluid. And I had open skin lesions where toxins were coming out of my skin. And so subsequently, I went into a coma because I was in so much pain and so much fear, and I had been fighting and fighting to stay alive. But I reached a point where it felt like this life wasn’t worth fighting for anymore because I felt staying alive was so painful, that death can’t be any worse.
And so I felt myself letting go. And all the days prior to this, I even had had trouble sleeping at night because I couldn’t lie flat, because I would choke on my own fluid. I was in so much pain and fear that I was on morphine.
But finally when I let go, I went into a coma, and I actually left my physical body. But what happened is that the doctors told my family that I was now in a coma and that my organs were shutting down.
And as I went into a coma, my body started to swell up, and they told my family that this is a result of my kidneys shutting down. And so my body was now swelling up and my organs were now shutting down one by one. And they told my family that I wouldn’t even make it through the night.
But even though my physical body was in the coma and my eyes were closed, I was aware of everything that was happening, everything that was happening in the room that my body was in. And I wasn’t viewing it with physical eyes. It was more like a 360-degree peripheral awareness. And I could hear, see, and feel everything that was happening in the room and beyond. I could see my mom was there, my husband. And I could even see my brother who was not in the room, but he was in another country trying to get on a flight to get to me before I died.
I could hear everything the doctors were saying, and what they were telling my husband, and what they were doing to my body. I was aware that they were drawing blood or they were removing fluid from my lungs. And then I felt my awareness, or my soul, or whatever we want to call it expand and go further and further or higher and higher.
You see, words don’t do it justice because we don’t have the right words in our language. But my soul or essence was expanding, and I became aware of a reality beyond this one where I was aware that I was surrounded by other beings. And these beings, I recognized some of them as my deceased loved ones. And I felt as though I was just enveloped in this feeling of just pure unconditional love, just this amazing feeling of unconditional love. And these beings were familiar to me, although I didn’t recognize all of them from this life.
But I recognized my dad who had passed ten years prior, and my best friend had passed two years prior from cancer. And there they were on the other side, greeting me among other beings as well.
And I also reached what I call the state of clarity, where I understood why I had got the cancer. I understood how it was that all the thoughts and decisions and choices that I had made in my life had led me to this point of lying there on that hospital bed dying.
And I also reached a point where—and a lot happened with my dad, which we can unpack as we move forward. I was in this coma for about 30 hours, so a little under a day and a half. But I did reach a point where I felt as though I was given a choice as to whether I wanted to go back into my physical body or whether I wanted to stay in that realm.
Now, no part of me wanted to come back into my physical body, because my body was struggling. I had been struggling. And I was in so much pain and fear, and my family were suffering taking care of me. So no part of me wanted to come back.
But I started to become aware that I, and in fact, all of us are more powerful than we have ever been led to believe. And if I chose to come back, that my physical body would heal.
And I started to also understand—and it was my dad who was communicating with me a lot. I started to understand that if I came back, my body would heal. And that my purpose—I started to understand that I hadn’t completed my purpose yet. And I realized that my husband Danny, his purpose and my purpose were linked. And if I didn’t come back, he wouldn’t be able to complete his purpose either.
But yet, I wasn’t being forced to come back. I still felt that I was being enticed, but not forced. And I felt that if I did not come back here and I stayed on that side, my husband Danny would probably join me not long after, because he wouldn’t be able to complete his purpose either.
And I understood also that because the doctors had said my organs were now shutting down and my kidneys had already shut down, and they had already taken the tests to show whether this was permanent or not, I understood that if I chose to come back, the tests would come back showing that my organs were starting to function again. But if I chose to stay in that realm, the tests would actually come back showing that it was death due to organ failure, due to end-stage cancer. In other words, the tests would show that I had organ failure if I chose to stay in that realm.
So my decision whether to come back or not actually would’ve been able to alter the test results of the tests that were already taken. And so time was not linear on the other side. And I was aware of other lifetimes that I had had with my husband, with my brother, with my mom, and the connections I had. But I could see these lifetimes all at once, not sequentially. So it was like time is not linear when we are outside of our physical bodies.
And there was just this incredible clarity where I understood why I had got sick. And I understood that I had a purpose, I had a mission. I understood that I was more powerful than I had ever been led to believe.
And during my life, my dad and I had a very turbulent relationship. And he brought me up with a lot of fear. And my parents are Hindu, and I grew up in a very multicultural society. I grew up in Hong Kong. I went to a British school. Hong Kong is a Chinese city, but I went to a British school with British classmates. And I spoke Chinese. I spoke English, fluent English at school, but my parents spoke to me in our Indian dialect. So I spoke three languages simultaneously. But my parents wanted to groom me for an arranged marriage as I was growing up, but I didn’t want an arranged marriage.
So I grew up with a tremendous amount of strictness and fear, fear of disapproval, fear of being disliked. And so my parents groomed me for an arranged marriage, and eventually I did get engaged to someone in an arranged situation. And when I was in that situation, I realized I could not live the rest of my life with this man because I would lose all my freedom. I would have to be a stay-at-home wife. I was not allowed to work. I was not allowed to do anything without his permission and without his approval. I was not allowed to go back and study or anything. And I had these big dreams that I wanted to travel the world.
So I ran away from that arrangement, which brought a lot of shame to my family, and it brought a lot of shame to his family. And I was told that no Indian man would marry me after what I had done.
So now here I was in this other realm, face-to-face if you will, but we don’t have faces. It was facing my dad’s essence, and my essence. And all I felt from my dad was pure unconditional love, when I thought I would be judged by him for what I had done because I’d brought him so much shame.
And it felt like he understood everything that I wanted him to know, and I understood him. I understood that when we cross over, that we not only leave behind our physical bodies. But we also leave behind our gender, our race, our religion, our culture, our beliefs. We leave all of it behind, and the only thing that crosses over is our pure essence, which is pure love, or pure God, or pure consciousness. So here was my dad’s consciousness and my consciousness, and we understood each other. And when you’re pure consciousness, there’s no judgment. There’s only love.
And so it was my dad that wanted me to know that I need to go back, that I had a purpose waiting for me, and I had some gifts waiting for me, and that I had suffered enough.
So during my life, it was my dad who had instilled fear in me. And during death, it was my dad who set me free from that fear because he said, “Now that you know who you truly are, go back and live your life fearlessly.” And that’s when I started to come out of the coma.
TS: Anita, there’s so much in your story that I’m practically, but not actually, jumping out of my skin. But here’s what I want to know. You said that you couldn’t have met your dad face-to-face, but it was essence to essence. How did you recognize, what was the form of recognition? Like, “This is my father”? People say all the time when you die, you’re going to meet these other people who have previously deceased you. And I think, what’s that actually going to be like, that meeting?
AM: Yes. So what happens is that you recognize them because it’s almost like, and it’s so hard to explain, but if you imagine somebody drops a thought into your mind, so you are aware that the physical body is not there, but yet you see it. You are given the visual image of who it is. So you have the visual image, but yet you know it’s not a physical body. And it’s almost like two essences or two souls or two spirits merging. It’s almost like if you were to see two clouds of smoke emerging, but each one has full awareness of who the other one is, like they have the image of who that other one is. And I’m going to say “image in their mind,” but again, what is mind? We don’t have physical organs.
TS: Now, you mentioned that there was your father, there was a friend who had passed recently, some other potential essences that you recognized, and then several that you didn’t. And I’m curious to know, once you reinhabited your body and the cancer healed, what has been your ongoing relationship with these forces of guidance and support for you? Are they present right now? Are you in touch with them regularly? How does that work for you?
AM: So yes, I am in touch with them regularly. Now, I like to think that we all have access to this. And this is what I like to think, that we all have access to our loved ones. But yes, this awoken in me or brought an awareness in me that I am surrounded by these beautiful beings who are helping me and guiding me and wanting me to succeed, wanting me and us to contribute to our evolution and to uplift the planet and each other, and to uplift in our evolution of the human race. This is what I feel all the time. But my awareness was drawn to it from the time I had the near death experience. And it hasn’t gone. I still feel them.
Two years ago, two and a half years ago to two years ago, I experienced a feeling of, I’ll call it burnout, where I just completely burned out. I was so tired and so sick, and I had to cancel all my public appearances because I felt the demands were getting too much and too big for me. And I just got really sick. I had all these physical symptoms. I had to go to the doctors. I had to go for tests. And people were saying, “Is the cancer coming back?” But at that time, I was so depleted I actually just said to all these guides, “OK, what now? Is it time for me to really cross over?” And there they were. I could hear them, I could feel them, and they said, “No, it’s time for you to change course a little bit. We’re going to, I guess, uplevel you a little bit.”
And so I started to notice that the guidance started revving up more, but I think I knew what to look for. They have never left me. And I always say that even when we don’t feel they’re there, they are always there. It’s just that we don’t know what to look for. And I can even give you clues as to how—
TS: Please, please give us clues.
AM: OK, so here’s the first thing that I believe why people struggle with getting in touch with that guidance system that we have, our loved ones on the other side. The first thing is that when you are in the state of fear, in the state of depression, in the state of turmoil, in this turbulent state that has become what the human race has become in recent times, it actually pushes you further away from your loved ones and your guides and even your soul’s purpose that is constantly trying to communicate with you. The best way to get in touch with them is when you can actually meet them, even meet them halfway.
So I would say a way of looking at it, and some of these terms are so cliché, but I’m going to use them. There is a frequency at which we operate. And these beings… so what happened is when I was able to be aware of them—“see” them, for want of a better word, but without physical eyes—when I was able to be aware of them, it was not as if they were a million miles away. It was as if they existed right here in front of me, but my eyes were not of the right frequency to be able to see them. My physical eyes were not viewing of the right frequency.
And you know how it is that animals can see things that we can’t, dogs can hear frequencies that we can’t. It’s exactly that. Our biology does not operate on the right frequency to be able to see them. But we can perceive them when we operate or raise our frequency.
And what lowers our frequency? Divisiveness, fear, anxiety, depression. And where are we right now with everything that we keep being bombarded with on media, social media, mainstream media? We’re all vibing at the frequency of fear. And so we are being pushed further and further away from this ability to be able to connect with that.
And so this is what my message has been is that you need to quiet down those voices out here, the aggressive voices out here in the world, because those are the voices that separate you from your truth. What you’re getting bombarded with in this physical world separates you from your truth, and who you truly are, and your connection to your soul and your purpose. But when you can quiet those voices and tune inward and consciously raise your frequency by doing things like—certain music can raise your frequency, joy raises your frequency, laughter, being with people you love, being with your pets, being out in nature. I mean, there’s so much you can do. And if you can do that more and more, you’ll start to hear them trying to communicate with you, and you’ll start to notice your life change.
TS: Can you describe for me right here in this present moment experience what your connectivity with these beings of guidance, what that’s like for you right here, right now?
AM: OK, so let me put it as tangible as I can. I get thoughts dropped into my head that feel like, “Aha, I should do this.” It’s almost like I get confirmation. Sometimes I’m pondering something or questioning something. I’ll say, “Should I go in this direction or that direction?” And I will get a thought to an image in my head as to which direction to go.
But the other thing that happens, what happens is that I will get a thought to maybe contact a particular person, and it’ll turn out that person will say exactly the right thing that I need to hear that will take me to my next step. Or I’ll get the thought to turn on the radio, which I do through Alexa. I’ll say, “Alexa,” and I’ll tell her to play my favorite station. That thought will come to me, and there will be a song with exactly the words that will actually create a thought in my head. And I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And I’ve started to recognize it, and it takes it happening over and over for you to recognize it.
But the thing that I consciously do is that I consciously do not listen to much of the news. I really don’t. I don’t listen to a lot of the political stuff that happens. Maybe just once a week for a few hours at the most, just to know what’s happening.
So the more important thing is to tune down or to tone down the things that take you into this space of fear, and then find things that really uplift you. So that’s the first thing. And then when you’re in that state, when even you’re doing mundane tasks, like you could be washing the dishes or doing laundry or ironing, or just doing mundane tasks, or even walking your dog if you have one, or even having a shower, that’s when I get these thoughts that keep getting dropped in.
But here’s the second thing I do. I will actually ask for signs. So when I make a decision to do something, I’ll actually say, “Can you give me a confirmation that I’m on the right path?” And then sure enough, there will be a confirmation. Something will come in my path to actually show me that yes, this is the right choice, this is the right decision. Something will pop up that’s so random, as I said, like a song. Or an animal will show itself that’ll signify something that I was thinking.
TS: Now you mentioned that part of what informed your decision to reinhabit your body—your body then went through its healing process, and you’re here now—had to do with realizing your purpose and expressing your gifts. And I could make a guess at what I think your purpose and your gifts are, but I’d rather hear it from you.
AM: So one other thing I just failed to say when you asked about how it feels for me, also it feels for me, and I was hesitant to say this, but it almost feels for me like I do hear voices. I do hear it’s as though somebody is talking to me. So that’s the other thing. And so that’s what I usually ask for confirmation, “Is this my own voice or someone else?” And then I get the signs.
But yes, you’re saying what is my purpose and what are my gifts? My purpose is that—I believe that my purpose is to teach people how to embody love in a fear-based world and to teach people how to alleviate that fear, to get over that fear, to overcome that fear. Because as we do that, we expand our own energy field. And the more we expand our energy field, the more we are impacting the whole: the whole world, the whole planet. Right now as a planet, as a whole, we have a very, I would say, a somewhat depressed energy field. And it’s like if you were to say the planet is one living organism, if the planet is one living organism just like a human body is one living organism, the planet is sick. And if each human on the planet is a cell, like a cell on your body—so when we say your body is sick, like if we say the physical body has cancer, what that means is that the sick cells are replicating faster than the healthy cells.
This is what I see that sometimes seems to be happening on this planet. The sick cells are replicating faster than the healthy cells. And what that means to me is that the fear-based energy or the fear-based people are spreading the fear faster than the opposite, which is the love-based, the people who are here to share love and to share light and to share upliftment. So the fear seems to sometimes be spreading faster than the love.
And so in order to heal the planet, we have to spread the love and share that and uplift so that spreads faster. And that’s what it means to go into healing. That’s kind of how I see it, and that’s what I see as my purpose into contributing, doing my best into contributing to that.
Because the gift I brought back for myself from the other side is that I seem to understand how the energy dynamics work and the importance of expanding the more love-based or positive energy, or the more higher-frequency energies. I seem to understand that. And also, I guess the other gift I have—I’m curious to hear your thoughts—is the intuition or the intuitiveness that I’ve brought back with me. And the guidance, and the ability to feel guided and to follow that.
TS: Well, what I noticed is hearing you say the words “embodying love in a fear-based world.” I wrote that down, and I thought that’s what I want to do. And I’m so happy to have Anita here helping us. And I think that is a big part of your gift, is that you’re living on purpose and you’re doing it. Which brings me to this question about embodying love in a fear-based world. My perception, and I’m curious what you have to say about this, is that in the last few years, it’s gotten harder to do that. It feels harder. And I’m wondering if you have a sense of that and what you make of that.
AM: Yes. I do know it’s gotten harder, but I can see why it’s gotten harder. It’s because up until now, in our evolution, I see that the way that we have come to where we are, the way that we have evolved, is through fear. And we have evolved to this point through all our messages are fear-based messages, but we have become a race that have become somewhat ruthless in our progress in this world, the way that we operate in this world. We have become very competitive.
Because mentally, emotionally, and psychologically, we come from a belief of scarcity. And one of the values that we get taught from the time that we’re really young is that there isn’t enough to go around, so you have to compete with everybody else to get ahead. That is one of the core fundamental values that has been ingrained in us for our survival.
But what we’re finding today is that that value is actually leading us to our own destruction, because it has made us competitive. It has made us ruthless in trying to get ahead of everyone, because we believe there isn’t enough to go around. All of these are myths. They’re not true.
And as a result of this value that there isn’t enough to go around, and so we have to get ahead of everyone else. We have to compete with everyone else. And as a result of being ruthless, what’s happened is that in this world, we value traits such as ruthlessness and people who win at all costs and competitiveness.
And if somebody is empathic or compassionate or sensitive, we see them as weak. And we say that you have to grow a thicker skin, and boys don’t cry. And we say, “You’ll never get anywhere. Don’t be so sensitive. The sensitive come last,” and so on. We have all these sayings, and we shame people who are empathic and compassionate, and we actually revere people who are ruthless, competitive, and win at all costs. And we vote them into power, into leadership roles, and they become our presidents. And then we wonder why the world is in the shape it’s in.
So basically, what I see is that there are two sides to this. There is a divisiveness happening, and I see an emergence of a new way of thinking where there are some people who can see this, who can see exactly what I’m saying to you right now, where we are starting to value empathy. We realize the world needs more of it. We’re starting to value kindness. We’re starting to value conscious businesses and working in a way where it’s a win-win for everyone, where we value the planet and the people on it. And these are the empaths among us. So there are those who are here to change the world.
But then there are still those who are from the old paradigm, who are actually wanting to hold on even harder. They’re trying even harder to fight back because they are so scared to lose that competitive edge, if you see what I mean.
So this is what’s created this divisiveness. And as those from the older paradigm fear losing this because they see this emergence of a new way of being and a new way of thinking, so they’re afraid of losing this, they fight back even harder. They’re fighting back even harder to hold on to this old paradigm. Whereas the new way that I see is that we need to actually have a different metric by which we measure strength.
I think for the future human, for the future survival of the planet, we need to define strength differently. We need to recognize that traits such as compassion, empathy, sensitivity, kindness, we need to define those traits as being strengths for the survival of our own planet, instead of seeing them as weaknesses.
TS: Now, I want to talk about having these two realities alive in each of us to some degree. And I’ll speak for myself just confessionally for a moment, which is one of the things that I’ve deeply been focused on in the last two years—and I don’t think I recognized until this moment potentially, Anita, how it’s part of a greater collective evolutionary process—is how from my own inherited family line, there’s views about scarcity around money and competitiveness, and that that still lives in me. And I’m trying to work it out. I’m trying to grow beyond it. And the part of me that lives in this tremendously creative, compassionate, abundant world, I want it to become not just 80% or 85, or I want it to really take over the whole—but it hasn’t. So what I’d like to know from you is for those of us who are working out our own historical, whether it’s a family lineage or it still lives in us, entrenchment in that scarcity perspective, how do we move beyond it?
AM: That’s such a great question, because you’re describing how I was as well. So first of all, what I would tell you is recognize that you are somebody who is aware, who is conscious. You are someone who wants to do good for the planet. So you are on the side of the paradigm that wants to awaken people. That’s why you do the work you do, right?
So the second thing I would want you to know is because you care so much for the people of the planet and the evolution of the planet—because not everybody is like you or me, and this is the point. We want there to be more people like you, and this is how we would get to the tipping point, for there to be more people like you. You have to recognize that, in fact, the conscious awareness that you have, even what you just described to me as to what’s entrenched in you. And so of course, you do sometimes have to be competitive to get ahead. But even when you’re doing it, you’re doing it with awareness. You’re doing it with an awareness that, “How can I balance this and still help the planet?” There’s this struggle going on within you.
Now, if you were somebody who was really ruthless, who really was what you are afraid of being, they would not even have the awareness you just displayed. They would not care. They would just be about getting ahead. And I’m talking about the people who perhaps have no problems with running a sweatshop and making money off the backs of poor people. There’s a lot of that that happens in this world. And those are the ones that fear this change the most, because the only way they know how to be successful is under threat if people like you or I suddenly become more powerful in the world.
So basically what you have to do, people like yourself, people who follow you, who listen to you, who read/listen to the work you put out, you are the ones we need more of, because you are aware of this shifting or this split. But you need to be aware that you are the ones we need more of.
And so the second thing is to really remember that while you are thinking of the planet and evolving the planet, you really, really need to think of yourself. And you really need to do what makes you feel joyful and what makes you feel passionate. And if you are starting to feel that this world, the duality of this world, the strife of this world is starting to get very difficult, and it’s starting to bring you down, and it’s starting to make you struggle, you need to then be aware that the world actually needs you to vibe at a higher frequency. Which means it’s time for you to pull away from the struggle, even if it feels selfish. You need to pull away from that struggle and do what it takes to make yourself happy and joyful and fulfilled again. I mean, I hope what I’m saying right now is making sense to you, because I’m thinking in my head there’s so many directions I can go with this question.
TS: Well, it is making sense and you’re picking up on a theme from your book Sensitive Is the New Strong, which I think is so important too, which is how people who are extraordinarily empathic—I’m not putting myself necessarily in that category, but I think many of the listeners are—and that we come to a place where we’re very concerned with other people, pleasing other people. And you talk about how we need other people to feel good so we can feel OK, and we leave ourselves out of the equation. And so I wonder if you can speak more about that, particularly in light of the people who are listening who are highly empathic people.
AM: OK, so that’s great. So what I want to do is I want to share with you a little bit about what happened with me. As a highly empathic person, I didn’t know I was an empath when I was growing up. It wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t something that was even brought to my awareness. Not knowing that I was an empath—and it’s very natural for empaths to be attracted to spiritual teachings and spiritual messages.
But the spiritual messages of that time were messages where I learned that the ego is bad and I had to overcome the ego. And I learned that it’s better to give than to receive and that I had to be of service. I had to live a life of service. I learned that I had to do good works all the time to build a good karma. All this was the result of all the spiritual teachings I was attracted to.
Now at the same time, while I’m attracted to all these spiritual teachings, I eventually get cancer. So I’m already an empath. I’m already putting everybody else’s needs before me. I’m already a people pleaser. I’m already a doormat. And then I get cancer. And I don’t realize, because I don’t have the understanding at that time, is that the reason I got cancer was because I had repressed myself so much. I dimmed my life so much that my soul was crying out, and so my body develops this illness.
But anyway, not realizing that, I started getting into spiritual teachings and seeing teachers and gurus who told me that it must be my bad karma. The reason why I got cancer must’ve been my bad karma. So I had to learn to be more giving and be of more service to everybody and see God in everybody else’s eyes to reduce the bad karma. And so here I was completely depleted already, being told to deplete myself even more.
And so what happens? I die. And only in death do I realize that my brand of spirituality at that time or maybe the brand that was a current for the world at that time was actually killing me. And I needed the opposite message. I needed messages to tell me that, “You are powerful. In your case, your ego is an ally, not an enemy, because you need to have a positive sense of self.” I needed to know that I was powerful beyond belief, that I matter.
And so there I was seeing God in everyone else’s eyes. But in death, I realized that I had never seen God in my own eyes. And I realized that was the most important thing I could do for myself.
And I learned that all of us are an expression of God. And if people have issues with the word “God,” it doesn’t matter. We can use the word “consciousness.” We can use the word “essence,” whatever we want. But let’s say all of us are an expression of pure consciousness, every single one of us.
So when you repress yourself, when you kill your ego, when you deny who you are, you are actually denying God or consciousness from expressing itself through you. And for me, that realization is what really helped me, is that as much as you, and you, and you, and everybody is a piece of God or an expression of consciousness, so am I. And I have to honor that as well. That was my biggest lesson.
TS: There’s a quote that I pulled from your writing. “You either have to swim against yourself, or be willing to swim against the crowd to be yourself,” and that this is part of this notion of becoming unapologetically who we are. And I wanted to find out, in recent years, how have you had to swim against the crowd, if you’ve had to? How have you done that?
AM: I have had to swim against the crowd for some time, probably since I had the near death experience at least. And in so many ways, when I first came out of the near death experience, I wasn’t understood.
I thought, mistakenly after coming out of the near death experience, I thought everybody would want to hear about what I experienced on the other side. I thought if it healed my cancer—because I healed very quickly after that. I thought if it healed me, surely it’s going to help everyone. Surely people are going to be interested so that they can apply it to everyone. But I was really wrong.
I healed quickly, and the doctors, they were amazed. They didn’t know what to make of it, but they just put it down to a spontaneous remission. But when I started to say, “No, I actually understood what happened. I understood,” and I started talking about what I experienced on the other side, and they said, “No, that was the drugs playing havoc with your brain. That was your brain coming up with all these stories.” And I said, “No, I’m sure it wasn’t, because it made so much sense to me.” It’s about truly being unapologetically you and going on a journey to find out who you are, and having meaning in your life, and knowing that your life matters. And I mean, there was just so much that I wanted to unpack and share.
But even my friends started to say that, “No, you have to start living in the real world again. This is all delusional mumbo jumbo,” because I started to say, “You can’t work at a job that you hate just to pay the bills. You’re here for a reason. Find something where it feeds your soul and start to find your soul’s purpose.” And people were like, “No, you got to get into the real world. We have rents to pay.”
So I did have to swim against the crowd. I did have to leave behind a few people. I lost a few friends. I had to move out of my neighborhood and move into a new city, a new town. My husband was so supportive, though, where we met new people who didn’t know the person I was before. It’s much harder when you’re around people who knew who you were before. So I had to swim against the crowd.
But here’s what’s interesting. What’s happened is ten years on, the very same people who said I was delusional—I had to swim against the crowd so that I could be myself, because I was not going to go back and be the person I used to be, because that was the person that got cancer. Those very same people now contact me from who I knew before and they’re like, “Oh my God, I love your life. I love the way you’re living life, and you’re helping so many people. I wish you’d help me, because I’m struggling. I’m struggling with the world and with my life.” And that’s where I have to say to them, “I guess you have to be delusional,” because that’s what they all thought I was at that time.
TS: Can you share with us your explanation of becoming someone who merged with this great love, and then your body started changing when you came back? How do you understand the body so quickly responding to this change of state of your consciousness? How do you understand the mechanism behind that?
AM: So I see the body, since I’ve had this experience, I see the body as being a reflection of our state of consciousness. And I’m very careful about saying this, because immediately, that makes anybody who’s sick feel like, “Oh my God, I must be in a terrible state of consciousness.” And I don’t want anybody to feel ashamed if they’re going through an illness, because even I’ve had health challenges since then.
So when I say it’s a reflection, it does not mean that every time you’re sick, you’re doing something. Because you could be a spiritual teacher and a spiritual leader, and you could still get sick. And two years ago, I did have a health challenge. So it doesn’t mean it never happens.
But what I do see is that—particularly, I have to say, with sensitive people and empaths—I’ve noticed a lot of people, because they’re sensitive, they feel their bodies reacting to surroundings, reacting to their emotions.
So basically, our physical bodies react quite quickly to our surroundings. And what it means, it’s not your fault. But sometimes, it means that maybe you are being too compassionate. You are putting other people too much ahead of yourself. You are being a doormat. In other words, it’s not something to be shameful about, but it is something to be aware that it’s possible.
And so this is particularly, if you’re an empath and you’re struggling with your physical health, it means you really do need to start putting yourself first. So I do see that certainly for myself, my body is my barometer into telling me whether I’m following my soul’s purpose or whether I’ve let the louder and more aggressive voices get to me. And it tells me where I’m starting to operate from fear instead of from love. And to me, operating from a place of love means a love of myself, so that I will follow my path and my passion and my soul’s purpose.
TS: Now this is a kind of strange question, but I’m going to ask you, because it occurred to me when you were talking about the experience itself, and you said that you saw past lives happening as simultaneous lives.
And one of the things I’m really curious about is whatever’s happening in our physical life now, our current life, does it have an impact on our supposedly “past” lives that could be simultaneous in a certain way? Is our current life affecting simultaneous lifetimes? And how do you see that? This is a kind of far-out question, but this is a true Insights at the Edge conversation that we’re having, Anita.
AM: I like that question. So the way I see it is that every life impacts the other lives. But prior to this experience, being a Hindu, I grew up to believe karma and multiple lives. I saw them as sequential. So you build up good karma and you take that into the next life, or you bring bad karma from the previous life into the next life, which is why I thought the cancer was a result of bad karma.
But when I was on the other side, I realized that every life contributes to the whole, to the soul. So if you imagine—and I need to use metaphors because there are no words to describe this exactly. So each life impacts it. So it’s not so much that just because I did bad things in the last life, that I’m going to suffer in this life. But it’s more like when you’re in between lives, when you’re not in a particular life and you’re in your soul and not in a physical life, it’s almost like you evaluate what you need to do next to kind of counter or to add to your experience.
So if I can use the metaphor of a building—and if you imagine a building, let’s say this building has seven stories. And each story is one apartment. So you just have one apartment per floor, seven-story building. And so when you are inside the building, you can only occupy one story or one apartment at a time. So you physically, Tami Simon, you cannot be on more than one floor at a time. So this is you. When you’re inside a body, you’re occupying one lifetime in linear time. So as you walk through one apartment, you’re only occupying one spot as you walk through. And that’s linear time, and one apartment is one lifetime. And you can only walk through in linear time through the apartment. So that’s your one lifetime.
But if you are outside of the apartment building, and you’re on the street, and you look at the building, you can see all seven floors, all seven stories at the same time. So when you are outside of your body, you see the entire soul and all the lifetimes. Because you are the soul, you become aware of the entire soul’s journey, and all the lifetimes, and how it all fits together. That’s kind of how I would explain it.
TS: That’s such a helpful metaphor. I love that. Thank you.
OK, I just have one last question for you, Anita. I mentioned this time that we’re in—the subtitle of your new book, The Power of Empaths in an Increasingly Harsh World—and I think this time that we’re in for many, many people is a very intense time. It’s a time when we’re very concerned about the future of the human species on earth. And I’m wondering from your perspective, connected to the sources of guidance that you’re connected with, how you see this time and how we can each align ourselves with embodying more love.
AM: So first of all, I would want all empaths to know that whether you realize it or not, that your default state is one of connection and intuition. That’s your gift. Your default state is to be highly intuitive, and you’re very connected.
So this brings with it a gift, and I don’t like to say “curse,” but a “not gift,” like a positive and a negative. The negative is that because you’re highly intuitive, highly connected, you connect with this energy, this strife that’s going on, the divisiveness and the depression, and all this turmoil that’s going on. You feel that very quickly, and you connect, and it affects you.
But on the other side, your gift, because you are highly intuitive, is that you also connect very, very well, very quickly with the other side, with your deceased loved ones, with spirit, your guidance, your soul, your soul’s purpose.
If you knew that you had that connection and you focused more on that, you would be able to connect very, very quickly. It’s your birthright. It’s your gift. It’s almost like to compensate you for being so sensitive to the noise that’s generated here in the physical world by the loudest and most aggressive voices here.
So you need to know that you are sensitive to both. However, in order to survive this time that we’re in, you need to consciously tune down the voices and the noise and the divisiveness that’s coming from this three-dimensional five-sensory world. In other words, the news does you more harm than good if you’re an empath. You need to tone that down. And you need to connect with nature more. You need to take care of yourself. So some of my answers are more prosaic in that you need to just look after yourself, have more baths, like soak in the tub, listen to more music, go out in nature, do things like that. You need to do that.
And when you do that, you will find the connection and the voices and the tuning in to the other side coming to you faster than people who don’t feel as much that they are empaths. You actually have that gift. But many of you have been blind or deaf to that gift, because you have been more focused or in tune with the louder voices of this three-dimensional five-sensory world, which have been extremely loud in recent times.
TS: Anita Moorjani, I have loved talking with you so, so very much. You’re someone who makes the other side not feel so “other” to me. I feel like, being with you, you function as a kind of bridge that helps bring that deep source consciousness of love right here and available to all of us. What a gift.
AM: Wow. Thank you. Thank you.
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