She Died, Saw the Truth About the Universe, and Came Back to Teach It | Anita Moorjani

Oh, every choice I was making in my life was made from a place of fear.

Fear of cancer, fear of being disliked.

The thing that you wanted to prevent most of your life came true.

Yes.

She's here to show you how to live a more full life so you don't have to die with any regrets.

Please welcome Anita Moorjani.

I could hear them saying to Danny, "She's not even going to make it through the night." And while they're talking about all this, I felt myself leave my body.

I've never felt so good before.

I've never felt that free.

After coming out of the coma, everybody says I was like a different person.

I was light.

I was euphoric.

But I knew the important thing was I knew I was healed.

And that is what I want to try and replicate for people who I see.

If love is our true nature, then why does it feel so much easier and more natural to choose fear and division?

I think even though love is our true nature, we are taught that—

Now, this is fascinating because I've never met someone who died and came back.

And Essentially, that's what happened.

A coma.

Did you technically die, or was it just a coma for 30 hours and then you were experiencing something else?

So I was in a coma.

My heart didn't stop beating, so I wasn't clinically dead, but I was clinically diagnosed as being in a coma where the doctors told my family, "This is it.

She's not going to make it through the night.

Her organs have shut down." Wow.

And is this like on life support?

Are they— are they have a machine connected to you, or is it just— I was connected to an oxygen machine, like I couldn't breathe without that oxygen.

I also had a nutrition tube.

I couldn't eat, so there was nutrition being piped into my body.

So, and of course, heart rate monitors and everything.

So I had all these tubes connected.

So without those They were— it was keeping you alive.

It was, yes.

It was helping me to breathe, but my heart didn't stop.

So, sure, but, but yes, they were keeping me alive.

I would have choked if I didn't have the breathing apparatus.

Wow.

And my lungs were filled with fluid, and so even by lying flat, I— the fluid— I would choke on my fluid.

So I had to be propped up a little bit and have the oxygen tubes.

Now, I was researching about kind of your backstory and how you grew up with a conditioning around,

you know, living with a lot of anxiety, trying to people-please, trying to do the right thing, trying to fit into your Indian culture, trying to behave a certain way to please people,

trying not to upset people.

And also, you ate perfectly, is what it sounds like, to try to prevent having cancer.

Yes.

Because you were afraid of getting cancer and a lot of your life was living in fear.

And so you ate raw vegan for a while, you were Ayurvedic for a while, you did all these correct things to not get cancer, and yet you still got cancer.

Yes.

Why do you think you got cancer even though you did everything that science tells you to do to not get it?

Because I think science misses one point and really it took death for me to understand this, and I share it because I don't want people to have to die to figure it out.

The biggest killer was the fear, the constant living in fear, doing everything I did from a place of fear.

It doesn't matter what you eat, but if you are in constant high stress and anxiety day in and day out, trying to live life a certain way, So, for example,

in the community I grew up in, my parents are Indian, but they were immigrants.

We lived in Hong Kong, predominantly a Chinese city.

I went to a British school.

So my peers, my classmates were all British, and I didn't fit in.

I didn't fit in with the British kids because my parents were instilling the Indian culture in me.

I didn't fit in with Chinese kids because I'm Indian.

But then when I would be with Indian kids, I didn't fit in there either because my first language started to become English and I started to become indoctrinated into British culture

and British pop culture and British pop music.

And so I was different.

I was all of these things and none of these things.

So I was always trying to fit in.

Wherever I was, I feel I didn't fit in.

The other thing was that as I was growing up, My parents were trying to groom me for an arranged marriage.

I didn't want an arranged marriage because none of my British friends had to go through that.

So I wanted

to study, I wanted to have higher education and get a job and earn my own money and travel the world.

But I wasn't allowed to do any of that because it makes you less desirable to a potential arranged marriage husband.

So women, from that time, from my culture, or the particular community I grew up in.

Particularly this happens with immigrants.

They want to hold on to their culture tighter because they're afraid their kids are going to lose their culture.

So I grew up in this culture with a lot of gender disparity where a woman's worth is measured by how valuable she is to the men in her community.

[Speaker:DR. JAMES SHAPIRO] Interesting.

[Speaker:DR. SHEKHARA] So I always had very low self-esteem.

And was always trying to fit in, was always afraid of displeasing people, particularly my dad.

I knew my dad was disappointed in me from the time I was a little child.

Really?

Just because I was a girl.

I think they favored boys, they favored sons over daughters.

Daughters are considered a burden.

Come on, really?

Yes.

I mean, a burden?

I know it's changing today, so I'm not trying to slam my entire culture.

But I have met enough people in the world who have said, "Oh my God, you're telling my story." So I know I'm not alone in this.

Where girls are considered burdens by parents or fathers or just the whole society?

By parents and by the whole of society.

Because

again, in the community and culture— How are men born?

Through women.

Exactly.

I understand that as a burden.

And yet when a woman is pregnant, All the good wishes, like all the prayers given to her, and she gets to go to the temple where the priests are blessing her.

They're all blessing her with a son.

And in our culture, a blessing is, "May you be blessed with sons." It's—

Wow.

Okay.

Yes.

I mean, how old were you when they were trying to create an arranged marriage?

Well, it started when I was in my late teens.

Now, so I had British friends, Chinese friends, Indian friends.

My Indian friends started getting married from the age of 17, arranged marriage.

All arranged marriages.

Yeah, so one of them— None of them had a choice of who they wanted to marry.

No, arranged marriages.

And so one of my best friends got married literally as soon as we finished high school, that summer.

We were on vacation, and then one of my best Indian friends said, she says to me, "My parents just got me engaged." And I was like, "What?" And then,

so my parents didn't push me into it that soon.

But when I was 19, my other absolutely best friend who was like a sister to me, she got engaged.

So by the time I was 21, my parents are like, "Okay." You're late now.

You're late now.

Yes.

So they got engaged.

They didn't know the man they were engaged to, or they just met them or something.

They get to know them after they're engaged, but then it's too late to back out.

You can't back out.

It's forced.

You're discouraged.

They don't call it forcing, but they discourage you.

And if you do, you're kind of like excommunicated, I guess, or you're shunned from the family or the community or the culture.

Because I did that and I was shunned by the culture and the community.

So you're 21, you have an arranged marriage, and what happens?

It took me a little while because I still was rebelling, but they started to try to push me towards an arranged marriage.

And at first I said, "No, I'm going to find my own husband." But then I started to get lonely because all my British friends had gone on to university and careers, same with my Chinese

friends.

My Indian friends had got married, So finally I gave in and I got engaged.

And then when I got engaged, the realization hit me of what the rest of my life would be like because I discovered the family I was going to marry into.

They didn't want me to work outside the home because I had— whenever I had said to my own parents, "I want to work, I want to travel," and they would say, "You can do that after you're

married if your husband approves of it." So again, in our community, in our culture, a woman doesn't move out of her parents' house.

She leaves when she gets married, and then she will live with her husband and most likely his parents as well.

That's common in different cultures, I guess, that like you may not leave if you're a daughter from your parents until your mid-20s or even 30, I guess.

But as long as you're single, you stay with your parents.

Right, interesting.

At that time, of course, it's changing, but This is to give you the background of my own life, my culture, the upbringing.

And yes.

Okay, so you're engaged for how long and then?

So I was actually engaged for quite a few months, during which time I was able to get to know the family.

And I realized I had made a mistake in agreeing to it.

But by that point, you're discouraged from backing out because you're being told all the way along, that if you back out, no one else is going to marry you because you will have tarnished

your reputation.

And I discovered that they weren't going to let me work outside the home.

I said, "Can I go back to school?

I never went to university." And they said, "Nope."

And I was to stay home and learn to be a better homemaker, a better cook, and to learn to clean house and all these things.

And I said, "I'm willing to do all those things, I want to also have something more.

But I was told, "No, and you're going to have to go to the temple a couple of times a week."

And so 3 days before the wedding, I just found myself feeling like, "I can't do this.

I can't spend the rest of my life doing that." And I ran away.

And if you know anything about Indian weddings, They are 2-week-long affairs, you know, with the musicians and banqueting and people flying in from all over the world.

And so we had all the relatives had already come.

Oh my gosh.

It was gonna be in India.

We'd all flown to India and I ran away and I hid at a friend's house.

3 days before you were supposed to get married?

Yes.

And I brought so much shame to my family and his family.

And this is— okay, so this was a long time ago.

This was in 1987.

And

the entire Indian community all over the planet had heard about it.

And this was before the days of the internet.

Oh my gosh.

Talk about, I guess, shame that you were feeling.

Guilt, shame.

Guilt, shame.

I felt I'd let my dad down even more.

No wonder I was a disappointment.

No one ever has walked away away from a wedding and this one person did it, right?

That's what it felt like, right?

You're the only one who's ever done this.

Yes, that's really what it felt like.

I had so many relatives saying to me, "We flew in," and you know, they'd brought presents.

Oh my God.

Oh, it was, and people were saying to my family, they were blaming my parents.

They were blaming my parents saying, "You spoiled her.

Why didn't you just force her to still show up at the temple?" All these relatives were coming to my parents' door and they told my parents, "No parents are going to let their son anywhere

near me after what I've done." Oh my gosh!

Your parents, you know, all the friends and the families that flew in are like shaming your parents now and saying they should have forced you to just get married and don't be a spoiled

little brat or whatever it is like.

Yes, literally they said, 'You should just slap your daughter and make her turn up at the temple.' They were even saying this the day before the wedding because I had already disappeared.

They were like, you know, 'We can find her and just slap her and send her to the temple.'

What a traumatic way to get married.

I know.

What a traumatic way, if that actually did happen, to be like, 'We're going to force you and you're just going to like it.' And my mom said, 'I'm not going to force her if she was so

distressed.' that she had to do this.

I'm not going to force her.

There was a lot going on inside of her.

Yeah, I think her mama bear came out and, you know— She was protecting you, that's for sure.

She was protecting me and she said, I'm not going to force her.

And that's when

they were saying, no, and my mom said, obviously there's something that's preventing her from feeling comfortable to do that, to move in with them.

And the relatives were saying, oh, they'll sort it out after they're married.

Just get her through this.

Oh my gosh.

So you didn't get married?

So I didn't get married.

Wow.

What did that feel like the day after the wedding was supposed to happen when everyone cleared out and there was no more ceremony and you knew you weren't getting married?

How did that make you feel?

I felt heavy.

It didn't feel like relief.

It didn't actually feel— it felt like I was caught between rock and a hard place, you know, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

It felt like I had disappointed everyone.

I felt sad.

I felt like grieving because I was young.

I didn't know how to process the emotions.

It felt like what today I would call grief.

It was like something had just ended.

And I felt I'm supposed to feel relief.

But it didn't feel like that.

Well, because everyone was disappointed in you, upset at you.

They didn't want to be around you.

They were— Yes.

And I had, luckily, I had a few very close friends who said to me, "You did the right thing because if you don't feel love or excited to get married, you shouldn't do it." And they

were there trying to cheer me up, support me.

That's good.

That's good you had that support.

I had that support.

Side note, just curious, how many people do you know who got an arranged marriage back then that are still married and actually happily married?

Hardly any.

Really?

Are there— I mean, there has to be some, but— I'm sure there are.

But are there any friends that you have from back then or any family members or relatives that you know back in the '80s and '90s who got married through arranged marriage?

Where they were forced to get married essentially by others choosing for them and they're still happily married or they're still, maybe they're married but they're not happy, I don't

know.

That's what I mean.

It's more shame to get divorced or something.

Yes, I know people who are still married.

Now,

when I say arranged marriage, they don't think that they're forcing you.

It's an interesting situation where they say, all we're doing is we're arranging the meeting and then it's up to you after that.

But it is forced.

But it's manipulative, at least that's what I experienced,

is that after you've met

and you then

request, let's say, a second meeting, at the most you're allowed maybe 2 meetings and always with chaperones.

And then maybe you go on one date, and then after that I went When you say something after going on the one date, when you say something like, "Yeah, they're really nice.

I don't mind seeing them again." That's when it's like, "Oh, you can't see them again unless you get engaged." And I'm like, "Oh, I'm not ready to get engaged, but I'm happy to get

to know them more." And it's like, "No, you can get to know them after you get engaged." Interesting.

It's more like that.

But you're not forced to get engaged.

But it's in that moment.

Now, what happened is, If

the girl, the woman's side always has the disadvantage in these situations, or at least used to.

I believe it's changing a lot today, and I certainly hope so for the woman's sake.

But what happens is that if the man says yes, like he gets asked the same question, would you like to marry her?

And then if he says Yes, actually, I think I will.

I like her.

For the man, it's the woman who has to give up her entire life and move into his house and follow his rules.

He doesn't have to change anything.

He doesn't have to change anything.

He still goes to work.

He still does his thing.

For her, she has to be willing to change everything.

So she wants to get to know him more before she makes that— Changes her whole life.

Yes.

So he says yes.

Now the news comes back.

To the girl's family, he said yes.

Now the girl is told, if he said yes and you say no, you come across as being choosy.

Is that a bad thing?

Apparently.

Don't you want to be like— Yeah.

But no, then it's like less and less people will be willing to come forward

because all this is called matchmaking.

Sure.

You will get less offers is what they say.

So if you can sum up your— the first 25 years of life, what were the internal feelings and mindset you had about yourself and the world?

The internal feeling was that there was something wrong with me.

I didn't understand why it was so easy for other young women in my culture to agree and go through with an arranged marriage and I wasn't able to.

The internal feeling was total disappointment in myself, self-loathing, fear, stress, anxiety, disappointment to my family, to my dad.

Yeah, I just thought I was a loser, a total loser.

Wow.

Yeah.

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What had happened then?

So you ran away from the arranged marriage

and you were living in this fear of not wanting to get sick or get cancer as well.

That Came after that.

After this?

Yes.

Why did that come where you were like, "I don't want to get cancer, so I'm going to do all the right things to make sure that I don't get it." I had two people very close to me, my

own age.

So this was a few years on.

I met my husband.

My dad passed away.

Then I met my husband, Danny, who is amazing.

I'm still married to him.

We really love each other.

And just a side note, he's Indian.

I told my parents I'm not marrying an Indian man, but

then I met an Indian man.

We fell in love.

His parents disapproved of me because of the broken arranged marriage.

Oh my gosh.

Yes, but he didn't care.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, so we got married and Then two friends, actually one was a relative, a brother-in-law, and my best friend, they both got cancer at the same time.

How old were they?

We now were in our 30s.

So we were in our mid-30s.

And

they both got cancer at the same time.

And I watched them deteriorate.

So as I got into my late 30s, I'd watched this happen and they were having the best cancer treatments that money can buy, and yet they weren't improving, they weren't getting better.

And as I watched this, I developed this huge fear around cancer.

And

so I decided I'm going to do everything I can to prevent cancer.

So I started reading up on cancer prevention and antioxidants, and I started ordering every kind of anti-cancer pill.

I was vegan.

I used to grow my own wheatgrass juice.

I ate only organic, which was actually harder to get at that time.

But then food generally was cleaner at that time too.

Where were you living then?

I was living in Hong Kong.

And so I wouldn't eat so much processed foods.

And I was cutting out sugar.

So I was doing all these things and I was so fearful of cancer.

And food was something that was scary to me.

Then when I would go out with friends and they'd be drinking or we'd be eating desserts, I would just be so scared of everything that I was eating because I'm watching these two people

dying from cancer and I'm reading these things and attending lectures held by naturopaths that are saying, "Sugar feeds cancer.

Alcohol feeds cancer.

Hormones in chicken, if it's not organic, they feed cancer cells." And I'm listening to all these podcasts and lectures and audiobooks and so on.

And I was obsessed with that subject.

I don't know what got into me.

I mean, I do know it's because I was watching these people.

So you add that into the mix where every choice I was making in my life was made from a place of fear.

Fear of cancer, fear of being disliked, fear—

and because of my upbringing, you know, where I mentioned that

women were actually rewarded for being subservient.

So I was not someone who was outspoken.

Like, I couldn't imagine the life I'm living today where I'm writing books, speaking publicly on podcasts with you that go out to millions of people.

I could never ever have even imagined that for me.

Wow.

But it sounds like you had a good marriage though, right?

You had like love and connection and intimacy.

Oh, that was— yes, that was the biggest gift in my life, was my marriage, was Danny.

He is amazing.

He's funny.

He has a sense of humor.

Because even when

we were dating,

you know, he was really funny.

I knew that his parents didn't accept me.

But he said, "Don't worry about my parents." And he didn't live at home with them, which was rare for an Indian man at that time.

He said, "I've moved out.

I make my own mind.

They know." I've told them I'm not going to marry an Indian woman and they'll be shocked I'm marrying an Indian woman.

So he was great.

But at that time, because I'd run away from the marriage, the rumor or the gossip that had spread about me in the Indian community in Hong Kong was that I ran away because I didn't

want to do housework.

Oh my gosh.

I know, isn't that?

So when I mentioned to Danny, I just wanted to make sure he knew what people were saying because I didn't want him to hear of it later.

So I just said to him, "You do know what all the people in the Indian community say about me?" And he said, "Yeah, but you don't have to worry.

I cook, I clean, I do windows." And so I started laughing and I thought, "Okay, he's funny." But

he was, you know, he was just, he is still

so supportive of me and my life.

But it was 6 years into our marriage that I was diagnosed with cancer.

Interesting.

And so you're diagnosed after years of trying to prevent it.

Yes.

And then you're diagnosed.

What type of cancer, I guess, were you diagnosed with?

I was diagnosed with lymphoma, cancer of the lymph node.

Lymph glands, I found a lump right here.

And at first they thought, oh, maybe it's just swollen glands.

And so the doctor just gave me antibiotics at that time.

And she said, come back next week and let's see if it's gone down.

It hadn't.

So she sent me to another doctor who did a biopsy.

And then

it confirmed it was cancer.

Then they sent me for the scans and they said it had spread to the upper quadrant.

So they staged it at stage 2.

What did you do next?

Then I was in even more fear.

Right.

The thing that you wanted to prevent most of your life came true.

Yes.

The scariest thing you wanted to prevent.

The scariest thing that I wanted to prevent came true.

Because had your two friends, were they still recovering from it?

Did they survive?

Did they— While I was dealing with the cancer myself,

I had this image that this is going to be a death sentence because I was watching them while I was dealing with the cancer.

They both died one after the other.

Oh my gosh.

And for me, oh my God, that confirmed in my head, in my reality, that this is a death sentence.

That's scary.

It was very scary.

So what did you do?

Like, how did you— did you create a game plan of attacking it?

Did you go like extreme veganism?

Did you start doing chemo?

Like, what was the process next?

So I started with just doing, um, uh,

natural, because I saw that the chemo radiation hadn't worked for them, for those two, for those two.

Wow.

Um, so first I'm grieving them, and then dealing with my own cancer, it was so scary.

So I started with trying traditional Chinese medicine because I live in Hong Kong, that was so easily available for me.

But I also had a lot of—

I also knew a lot of naturopaths because I was so into that subject of eating healthy.

I knew immediately what practitioners to go to.

But here's what made it even harder for me.

You had all these people, like Hong Kong is very developed, westernized.

There's more Western medicine available than, say, traditional Chinese medicine, even though it's a city that's off of China, because Hong Kong was ruled by British.

So it's very much infiltrated by British laws, British legal system, British organizations.

So

most of the people that I knew in society, in the community, were saying, "Oh, you have to go and do the normal route," because the doctors were telling me, "You need chemotherapy."

I said, "Wait, I don't wanna do chemotherapy yet because of what I've seen it do to my friends."

Everybody in my community and my friends and everybody was saying, "Don't be crazy, don't be silly, don't play with your life.

Do what the doctors are saying." My naturopathic friends, 'cause I was so entrenched in that, were saying, "Don't do the chemotherapy.

It's poison.

It's gonna kill you." It is poison, right?

I mean, it's like— Yeah, yeah.

So I had both of these in my ears, and that made me even more stuck.

Every day I was like, "What do I do?

I don't know what to do." It was just the worst place.

I was scared of the cancer.

I was scared of the chemotherapy, the treatments for cancer.

I was scared of the tree.

I was scared of death.

I was scared of everything.

It was like I was trapped.

I felt like I was in a trap.

What did you do?

I

had to leave Hong Kong for a little bit and clear my head.

I actually went to India.

Now, even though I'm ethnically Indian, I've never lived in India, but I had traveled there many times.

So I spent about 6 months there doing Ayurveda.

And in India, because I was away from all that noise and the conflict, the both sides saying, "Don't do that, don't be crazy, don't do that," I was away from all that.

And I started to practice Ayurveda and I started to follow a teacher, a yogic teacher who was he was an Ayurvedic teacher and taught yoga as in a whole way of life.

He kept saying to me, "Forget about the word cancer.

It's just an imbalance in your body.

Let's balance your body." That felt so good.

For the first time, I felt the fear was starting to lift.

It was actually shifting.

And he gave me an actual roadmap.

But then I had to go every morning at 6:00 AM, I had to go for an hour to the yoga teacher's, the ashram.

Then I would get to go home.

My mom had a house there at that time because she had left Hong Kong after my dad passed away.

I would go home and then every evening at 6:00 PM, I had to go back.

Twice a day, I had to go to this ashram which was really near my home, so it was great.

This is like doing a yoga practice or meditation or breathwork, or— it was all— it was meditation, yoga practice, breathwork, and a teaching of what to eat, what not to eat.

And he would— and there was his wife as well, and they would check in, how are you feeling, how's your body doing, um, and they would talk to me.

And so it was— I was there for 6 months doing this every single day, and they would

And my diet, even though I was vegetarian, I was no longer needing to be vegan.

When I was with the naturopaths in Hong Kong, they were Western naturopaths, I was encouraged to be organic, raw, vegan.

And I didn't like that at all.

Yeah, that's tough.

It was tough.

Here in India,

I was told that, "No, you can eat hot food." You can eat spices, you can have cheese and milk and paneer, cottage cheese.

So my diet actually broadened.

You can have oils, butter, ghee.

And so I was enjoying the food.

I was actually getting healthier and healthier.

So I was eating and I was

doing the yoga and I was being told, and in an environment where we didn't even use the word cancer, My sessions at 6:00 AM was just me on my own.

And then my sessions at 6:00 PM was with a group, was with a class.

And so going through this every day, and they would tell me, even when you are with your friends, your family, don't use the word cancer.

Just say you're dealing with an imbalance, you're correcting it.

And over the months, I actually got a lot better.

I was healthier.

The lymph nodes went down.

It all went— I felt it dissolving.

It was pretty much gone.

And I thought, okay, I can keep doing this.

I'll keep doing this in Hong Kong.

I went back to Hong Kong.

My husband had come to visit me a couple of times, but I was missing home.

When I went back to Hong Kong, people were like, oh my gosh, you're looking so healthy.

You're looking great.

What happened?

And I told them.

Now, all the people who were all pro-Western medicine said, oh, wow, you know, Ayurveda, I don't know, it's not proven.

I don't know about this stuff.

You need to go and get yourself checked.

Go see that oncologist anyway.

Go check in and have them do the scans.

And as soon as they started knocking Ayurveda and saying, "No, you know, it doesn't really work and it's all woo-woo."

And I'm going back like 22 years or so from— Right.

Yeah.

So when they were saying all these things, I felt the fear all coming back

and I felt this resistance going into that hospital setting.

And I thought, "Oh my gosh, oncologist again." You're talking about chemo, radiation.

That's all they know.

I watched two friends die with that.

All that is going in my mind.

But I was getting this hammered into me every day.

My husband was so supportive of me though.

It got to the point where he even had to screen my phone calls because there were certain people that were calling me and saying, "We're saying this for your own good.

You're being crazy.

We saw your friend die.

We don't want this to happen to you.

You need to go to the oncologist.

And I felt, oh, but my friend died because of this, because of that.

So, um, so the fear and anxiety started to come back.

The environment, the friends, their— although their intentions were good, their energy, their words, the environment around that consistently

created the reaction within you that caused more stress, anxiety, and tightness, which caused the inflammation of the cancer to come back is what I'm hearing.

Yes, exactly.

And it took quite a few months, but I started to feel all the lymph nodes get swollen again.

I knew it was back and I became really, really scared again.

And at that point, I,

I just couldn't deal with it anymore.

And I said, okay, I'll just go to the doctor.

And they're like, yeah, it's right there.

It's right there.

It's like it all came back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And they said, they told my husband, you only have 3 months to live.

So from that moment until you're in the hospital for a 30-hour coma because your organs failed,

how long of a time was it from that moment when they told you you had 3 months to live until you had 30 hours in a coma?

It actually only took 6 weeks for me to really deteriorate at that point.

Because from the time— so for me, going into a hospital, going and seeing oncologists, going and starting that whole process,

it was so traumatic inside.

And again, this feeds to me wondering, what is wrong with me?

Other people go to hospitals, other people have treatments, but my body just can't take it.

I completely broke down inside.

I couldn't eat.

I lost my appetite.

And because I couldn't eat, my body stopped absorbing nutrition.

Yeah, man.

And my lungs started to fill with fluid.

And I weighed about 85 pounds.

Very, very quickly, I decreased dramatically the minute I started to enter into the

into the whole clinical hospital oncology environment.

That's why today, and I'm just jumping forward for a minute, I'm a big advocate for changing the way that hospitals treat patients.

Because for me, it was incredibly traumatic.

Yeah.

I watched people die in that situation.

Yeah.

Not everyone does this, but it seems very clinical and cold.

It is cold.

And scary.

It doesn't feel emotionally warm.

Not at all.

And you don't feel like they've got you, they're helping.

No, they're just like, "On to the next, let's get you this, and we got to get to the next appointment." The whole system's broken because they're not encouraging doctors to really be

practitioners.

It's like, "Well, you just got to get through the patients and move on to the next." Yes.

So it's, who do you blame?

Yeah, it's not the doctor's fault.

They enter the system wanting to help people.

A broken system.

Yes, yes.

This must have been scary then.

What happened right before you went into a coma?

Do you remember?

Yes, clearly.

So then, because the doctors told my husband that I only had 3 months to live, basically they put you on, or they kind of say, there's nothing really we can do, you know?

So I was just being kept comfortable at home.

I had— Waiting to die.

Yeah, I had a full-time nurse.

I had a full-time nurse and my mom flew to Hong Kong to help take care of me.

And my husband, Danny, he lost his job because he was at home all the time.

He didn't want to leave me even for one minute in case, you know, I went— Something happened, yeah.

In case something happened.

And over those weeks,

my condition deteriorated faster and faster.

Like I was choking on my own fluid and I had to bring, like I had the oxygen tank at home.

I started to need the oxygen as the weeks went by.

I couldn't go even 5 minutes without oxygen, not even 3 minutes.

It just, the time got less and less that I could be without oxygen.

Every 2 weeks I had to go into the clinic to get my lungs drained from the fluid.

And so I deteriorated to the point where actually on February 1st,

I was in so much pain and so much discomfort, I just asked the nurse if she could just give me a bigger dose of morphine so I can sleep.

Because even when I would lie flat, I would choke.

And of course, even in bed, I would have the oxygen on me.

So she gave me morphine and she went home for the night.

Like she would leave at 10 o'clock at night and then my husband would be there in bed with me.

And the following morning on February 2nd, I didn't wake up.

And my husband called the doctor and the doctor said, "If you can get her into the hospital, please bring her here.

Like call an ambulance and bring her over here." And he was trying to wake you up, or he was trying to shake you, or he was trying to see— because my husband said, there has to be something

you can do, you know.

He wasn't ready to let go.

But you weren't waking up, but you were still— your heart was still beating.

My heart was still— because the doctor said, she's still alive.

He said, yes, she's still alive.

He's like, okay, if she's still alive, bring her in.

If her heart is still beating, bring her in.

Let's check if there's anything.

So he brought you in.

So he brought me in the, you know, so in the ambulance, my mom, my husband, and me.

And we go into the hospital and I'm already in the coma.

Now the doctors are looking at me and they're saying, she's in the coma.

And they're testing and they're checking my eyes and it's in my medical records that she's clinically diagnosed as being in the coma.

And they said, her heart's still beating, but she's not there.

But I'm still connected.

And then they take off all the portable things, the portable oxygen, and put me on the actual oxygen.

And then they say, she's completely malnourished.

That's the first thing they said.

She is completely malnourished because you hadn't been eating for— I hadn't been 6 weeks or something.

Yeah.

So they say, we're going to put a food tube into her and we're going to feed her piped nutrition.

And then they're connecting me to a heart rate monitor and the oxygen thing on your finger, and you're connected.

But they're at least pumping food into me.

Um, and they said, but her organs have shut down.

They said her kidneys have already started shutting down because my ankles were now swelling up.

And so they told Danny that She's not going to even make it through the night.

And while they're talking about all this,

I felt myself leave my body.

I literally, it was like I had been in so much fear, fearing death, fearing the disease, fearing the treatment, fearing everything.

And it's like nowhere to go.

I popped out.

Like I popped out of my body,

and I became aware of everything that was happening all around me.

And I became aware of my physical body that was lying on that hospital bed.

Now, I didn't have physical eyes, so it's not like I was looking with physical eyes.

It was something more powerful than that.

It was like a awareness.

It was like 360-degree peripheral awareness.

So it's not like you were above looking down at everything, but you could kind of

see everything around you still?

Yes, but I could— I was even aware I could see my body and my— but I felt incredible.

I never— I've never felt so good before.

I've never felt that free.

There was no fear.

The fear was gone.

The pain was gone.

I just felt more incredible than I ever recall feeling in my physical life before.

And I felt powerful.

I've never felt this powerful before.

Could you hear what was happening around you?

Yes.

You could see who was in the room, like you could sense it, I guess.

I could see it.

But not from your body, from a different perspective.

From a different perspective.

And I could hear it, not with my ears, but— and I could see and hear and feel what was happening beyond the hospital room, outside.

And I saw and heard the doctors saying to Danny, "She's— her organs have shut down.

They're shutting, you know, they've shut down one by one.

Her kidneys are completely shut down." I could hear them saying to Danny, "She's not even going to make it through the night." 'And if there's anyone you need to inform, now's the time.'

I could see my mom clutching one of the doctors by the arm or the elbow saying, 'Isn't there anything you can do?' And your eyes were shut during this?

Your eyes were shut, but this was like confirmed afterwards?

They're like, 'Yeah, all these things happened.' This was confirmed afterwards.

Oh, interesting.

Because I shouldn't have heard any— I shouldn't even have heard that they were telling, that the doctors were telling my husband that I wouldn't make it through the night because he

later told me he didn't even say that to me in the room.

He said it down the hallway at the nurse's station.

But you still heard it somehow.

I heard it.

It's like I was everywhere.

Everywhere.

It's like your soul expanded and it had different senses.

Exactly.

It's what I understood is that

in our physical bodies we are 5-sensory beings.

But when we don't have our bodies anymore, we're actually multisensory beings.

That's what it felt like.

And so

I felt expanded and powerful,

and it felt like I understood why I had the cancer for the first time.

It was like I was in this state of clarity.

What did this understanding, what did it say to you?

This clarity, it was like I could see and understand how it was that every incident in my life, every thought, every decision, every choice I had made up to that point had led me to

that moment of lying there in that hospital bed dying.

And I could see, it was like I could see the whole trajectory and I understood why.

And I understood in that moment, clear as anything, that the disease wasn't the cancer.

The disease was the fear.

Wow.

That was the biggest thing.

Like, oh, it wasn't the cancer.

It was the fear that killed me.

Because you all, you did, it sounds like you did a lot of the right actions.

Yes.

You took the right actions physically.

Nutritionally, learning about things, like you

acted in accordance to have no cancer except for the way you thought and the way you believed and the way you felt.

And those connections created so much tightness or fear or cancerous buildup.

Yes.

And it manifested from your thinking into your mind into your whole body.

Yes.

Is what I'm hearing.

Yes, and it started even from the time as a child.

I was always a very repressed child,

introverted, shy, repressed child.

And so what it felt like to me— again, I'm not a scientist or a medical doctor, so I can just go by what it felt like to me in that in that state, I wanted to know as well.

It's like, why did I, how can I have got something so serious and so aggressive?

Like I didn't do anything to deserve it.

I was so careful with my diet and everything.

And the response or the understanding that I was feeling was that

it wasn't because you did anything wrong.

It was because your soul or who you are is so powerful that it has been wanting to express itself for so many years.

Wow.

And you repressed it, not only because you didn't think you were good enough and you were not worthy because you were a girl, and then because of the fear and the anxiety and the people

pleasing.

It's you pushing down something so powerful and repressing it that when it exploded, it exploded.

It actually— this is your soul's way of expressing itself.

And if you think that cancer is aggressive, it's just a message to how powerful your soul was.

It's your body communicating with you.

So it was like the little child in you that had been repressed for 35+ years.

Yeah, 40 years at this point.

40 years screaming at you saying, if you're not going to Listen to me and actually communicate.

Yes.

I'm going to express to you through pain.

Yes.

So you are forced to listen.

Yes.

And here's the thing.

Gosh, it's fascinating.

This repression

was so— this people pleasing was so ingrained in me that even while suffering from cancer, the cancer is not the cancer that healed me from the people pleasing.

It was death, which is why I keep sharing my message.

While I had cancer, I was still a people pleaser,

even though I needed the help.

All the way to death.

Yes.

And when people would try and help me, they would say, "We're gonna drive you.

We're gonna do things for you." I would say, "Oh no, no, don't worry about it.

I don't want you to go out of your way.

I'm fine.

I can deal with it." I didn't want people to know I was sick.

I didn't want people to feel I needed help.

It was only when I died did I realize, oh my God, I need to allow people to help me when I need help.

This is why I tell people, don't wait until you die.

When I came back, obviously I'm here, I recovered.

One of the first things I wanted to know is, why did I need to die to find this out?

Why don't we know this already?

And this is why I share my story and tell people that you don't need to be a people pleaser.

And you know, who you are is enough.

Wow.

Did you have an encounter with God when you were in that coma?

So I have a different understanding of God because of the encounter.

I feel that God is not a being, but a state of being.

Because in that space, in that state, I felt surrounded by other beings.

I felt my dad, my dad's essence as well.

And he had already passed.

He had passed 10 years prior.

And I felt his essence.

And what I felt from my dad was pure unconditional love.

Wow, that's beautiful.

And I was expecting to get judgment from him.

There was no judgment.

Now, of course, my dad didn't present himself as a physical being because he wasn't.

It was just pure energy or pure consciousness.

But I knew it was my dad.

It's almost like, you know, it's like telepathically you're given this image, this is who this person was in your life.

And I felt nothing but just love from him and for him.

And that's when I understood that just as much as I'd been a victim of the culture, he'd been a victim of the same culture.

Of course, yeah.

And I realized that when we cross over, not only do we lose our physical bodies, but we lose our gender, our culture, our beliefs, our religion, and all the baggage we've carried over

all these years.

All that is left behind over here.

And what crosses over is just pure love or pure consciousness.

And that's what I experienced with my dad.

It was his consciousness and mine merging.

This is something I read about what happened.

It said within 5 weeks of being told you had hours to live, you left that hospital completely cancer-free.

Yes.

An oncologist flew from the US just to review your case and told you, "Any way I look at it, you should be dead." What did that experience teach you once that doctor came in and said,

"There's no way this is possible"?

It changed my relationship with my body because in that state, when I was in that state, I was given a choice as to whether I wanted to come back into the physical body or not.

Really?

Yeah.

In the coma?

In the coma.

Like, so I was given the choice and no part of me wanted to come back.

'Cause you felt so good.

I felt so good.

Peaceful.

Peaceful.

Free.

And I felt love, like I was in this sea, ocean of love.

No part of me wanted to come back.

What is this choice?

Was it like

a being gave you a choice?

Was it God was like, "What do you want to do?" Was it your own consciousness that said, "Do you want to come back to the physical world or stay in this space?" So it's almost like my