Anita Moorjani had been rushed to the hospital after she fell into a coma due to her end-stage lymphoma. Feb. 2, 2006, was the day she “died.” Her tumors had grown to the size of golf balls and lemons, and the rest of Moorjani’s body had wasted away. She was skeletal by this time, having spent the prior four years becoming progressively more ill.
The doctor told Moorjani’s husband she was no longer “in there” and that it was “too late to save her.”
Moorjani had been comatose at the time, yet she could hear and see this conversation. She could feel and see the emotional frenzy of her family members, including her brother, who was in another country and had to fly out to see his sister. But most surprising to her was how wonderful she felt—buoyant and pain-free, and feeling for the first time in her life a perfect acceptance of who she was.
“I was so weak that my body had stopped absorbing nutrition. My lungs were filled with fluid. I had these open skin lesions where toxins were coming out ... and I weighed about 85 pounds, I was like a skeleton,” Moorjani said. “My muscles had completely deteriorated. I couldn’t even stand up. I couldn’t even hold my head up.”
“I was in so much pain and I feared everything: I feared cancer, I was fearing the treatment. I was fearing death. So life was really really uncomfortable, I was in so much pain and so much discomfort,” she said. “And I was fighting, I had been fighting for years fighting for my life fighting to stay alive. But on the night of Feb. 1, 2006, I stopped fighting, I realized that this was too hard. It wasn’t worth fighting for that even death can’t be worse than this. So I let go.”
She didn’t wake up the next day. Doctors told her family Moorjani wouldn’t make it one more day, and yet she sat up the day after, fully cognizant, telling her family she would be alright and having a conversation with her oncologist.
Moorjani had had a near-death experience and woke up transformed, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—even the physical changes were fast-acting. She described a vivid experience in an expanded realm, and she knew the cancer was now gone. She knew how, why, and that it was only a matter of time before the tests would confirm this. She left the ICU four days after her coma.
Years ago, her near-death experience may have been dismissed as a trick of her dying brain, yet her mysteriously gone cancer could have made the most conventional of medical practitioners take pause.
Feeding the Cancer
Moorjani had been terrified of cancer even before her diagnosis.“I grew up believing that I had to work really hard at being worthy and deserving of love,” she said. There was nowhere Moorjani felt completely accepted, and nowhere she felt she truly belonged. Love in this world was always a “conditional love,” she said.
“And even though that may not be true, like maybe your parents love you unconditionally, it doesn’t always feel that way,” she said. “My dad was very, very strict, and so I was always worried about not having his approval ... to me, love and approval were the same thing.”
“I was a completely invisible, egoless doormat,” she said.
It was a type of fear, Moorjani said, and over the course of her life, she came to “fear everything.”
“Fear of not being good enough, fear of being disliked, fear of disappointing people, fear of failing, fear of cancer,” she said.
In 2001, Moorjani’s best friend was diagnosed with cancer, and that news shocked Moorjani to the core. Her friend Soni was young, strong, vibrant, and healthy, she said. If she could get cancer, who was safe?
Months after news of Soni’s diagnosis, Moorjani’s husband’s brother-in-law was diagnosed with a different aggressive cancer.
Moorjani started to read about anything that could potentially cause cancer, and cut it out of her life. Pesticides, microwaves, preservatives, mobile phones, plastic food containers, air pollution—eventually she began to fear life itself.
In the Coma
When Moorjani would not wake up on Feb. 2, 2006, her husband called her doctor, who advised him to have her rushed to the hospital. When they got there, doctors said her organs were already shutting down one by one.“But unbeknownst to everybody around me, even though my physical body was in a coma, I was aware of everything that was happening around me,” she said.
“I had felt as though I had left my body. And I felt incredible. I felt really light and I felt free. And all the pain was gone. And the fear was gone. I don’t remember ever feeling this way ever, ever, not in my physical life.”
She felt, for the first time, that she could relax. She did not need to work for love and acceptance.
“I’m just this divine soul, this divine being that’s worthy of being loved,” she said. “And that’s when I realized that when we cross over, we leave behind everything we leave behind our culture, our gender, our race, our religion, all of it.”
“I felt a feeling of, like, being bathed in a sensation of what I call unconditional love. It was just a sensation of pure and divine love. I was just bathed in that feeling and it just felt really, really incredible.”
“And I just kept going deeper and deeper into that realm where I felt that I was loved, that for the first time, I felt I didn’t even have to prove myself to be deserving or worthy of the love. I was loved just because I existed, I was surrounded,” Moorjani said.
Growing up in a traditional Hindu family in Chinese and British cultures in Hong Kong and Singapore, Moorjani had always felt the odd one out. As a young girl, she overheard a conversation between her mother and a neighbor who took pity on Moorjani’s mother for having a daughter, and it left a deep impression on her to never disappoint her parents. Unwittingly, she lived her life trying to cut herself down to fit in the various molds she thought the people around her created, and felt deeply inadequate.
But she had a small circle of supportive loved ones: her mother and husband, who were in the room with her; her brother, who was on his way there; and Soni, who died to cancer two years prior.
In that realm of light and unconditional love, Moorjani came to a point where she was surrounded by spiritual beings, which included Soni, and her father.
“And it was as if they were there to greet me,” she said. “And there were other beings, but I don’t recognize all of them from this life.”
‘I Had Wanted to Come Here’
Time had no meaning in this other realm, as other near-death experiencers have also reported. Moorjani was able to instantaneously learn vast amounts of information and relive her life with full understanding, and she has since written a number of books to share her lessons.“I learned a lot on that other side,” she said. “But I reached a point where I felt as though I had a choice as to whether to return into this physical life, or to stay in the other realm and continue in that realm.”
“I didn’t want to come back, because that realm was so beautiful, and I felt so loved. And you know, coming back here—man, coming back into this physical body where my body was suffering, and I was in so much pain and fear, and my family had been suffering taking care of me—no part of me wanted to come back.”
But then she felt the unconditional love from the spiritual beings around her, encouraging her.
“They were telling me, particularly my dad was telling me, that ‘your work isn’t done yet, you haven’t fulfilled your purpose yet, and you still have things to do. And it’s not your time’—that was the main thing. They said it was ‘not your time,’” Moorjani said. She didn’t feel forced, but that it was entirely her choice.
“And it felt like that when I had come into this life, the first time, that I had wanted to come here.”
“It felt like I had wanted to come here to accomplish certain things, to fulfill a certain intention. And I hadn’t fulfilled them yet,” Moorjani said.
At first, Moorjani had been hesitant to return to a sick and dying body, but then she realized that now that she understood why she got sick, she would have the opportunity to reverse her illness.
Rapid Healing
Moorjani knew that if she went back to her body, her organs would start functioning again.“I knew that as long as I came back with this intention—that I am worthy, that I matter, that my life has a purpose—and as long as I come back knowing that feeling, with an intention to go and fulfill my purpose, that my physical body would follow,” she said.
It remains a medical mystery how Moorjani’s organs, which had shut down by the time she got to the hospital, began functioning again a day later.
A few days later, the tumors that were as big as lemons in various parts of her body had shrunk by 70 percent. How billions of cancer cells left the body so quickly while her organs weren’t fully functioning also remains a medical mystery.
By the time her scheduled biopsy came around, her lymph nodes were too small to have a sample taken.
Doctors had noted that Moorjani’s open skin lesions needed reconstructive surgery because her body, with her muscles already wasted, did not have the necessary nutrients to heal. Yet the wounds all closed themselves before the team was even ready to operate.
Fulfilling Her Purpose
In life, her father’s lack of approval had instilled fear in Moorjani. But in death, he was the one who set her free from fear, she said.Moorjani hadn’t known what her purpose was in that moment of encouragement from the spiritual party, but she knew it would unfold over time if she lived truthfully and fearlessly.
“Over time, I realized that my purpose is actually to alleviate fear in people,” Moorjani said. She knows intimately how fear devoured her own life, and the near-death experience let her realize how to live without fear. Rather than making a decision out of fear of making the wrong decision, she can now make decisions from a place of love and joy.
It’s a mistaken belief that the decisions themselves—what to eat, which of two jobs to take—are more important than why we make them, she explained.
“So I made a pact I made a commitment to myself to live my life from a place of love,” she said. “My life completely turned around.”
“I often tell people that when you’re really sick, and people tell you you’re dying, the most important thing isn’t about trying to figure out how to stop the illness. It isn’t about researching your illness. The most important thing is to figure out: what would you do with the rest of your life if you were healthy today?” she said. “What would you do differently? In what ways have you not been following your passion? You see, it wasn’t the cancer that was killing me. It was me that was killing myself by not living my life to the fullest. The cancer actually saved my life.”
Help From the Other Side
Moorjani has also been able to help people free themselves from the fear of death.“My friend [Soni] has played an incredible role both in life and also after I crossed over,” Moorjani said. While she was in that other realm, she felt that Soni had made the choice to stay, rather than return.
“I would want people to know that if our loved ones choose to stay there, it’s not because they don’t love us enough that they don’t come back, it’s actually because they believe they can do more from the other side,” she said.
“The love we feel on the other side is so unconditional, that we make the more unconditionally loving choice,” Moorjani explained. “She was able to help them more from the other side, and that’s why she chose to stay there. But I felt that she knew that I would serve a better purpose being here, so she was also encouraging me to go back.”
Moorjani meets many people who fear death and says there is nothing to fear about the afterlife. We are souls full of knowing, but over the course of a life, this gets conditioned out of us, she said.
“What has happened is that having an experience like that has taught me that there is a whole other, unseen world,” she said. This unseen world is filled with spiritual beings who are willing and hoping to guide each and every one of us. We all have our own, and they are always there, she said, always trying to communicate with us.
“But we don’t always listen,” she said. Most people are bombarded with noise from the physical world through various media, much of which contains fear-based information. She advises people to make a conscious effort to take in less of that.
“This information that’s bombarding us grips our energy, it grips our mind. And it has this hold on us,” she said. In this state, there is no room for us to hear the divine messages trying to help or guide us or answer our prayers.
“We have a soul, and we have a physical body. And what happens is when your physical body doesn’t recognize that you are a soul, and when the physical body thinks that all there is—this three-dimensional, five-sensory world—then actually you’re getting very limited information,” she said.
“Having that experience showed me, without a doubt, that there is a whole other part of me that’s much greater than my physical body—much greater,” she said. “And it’s connected to something much greater than this three-dimensional world, this five-sensory world. It’s connected to the universe.”
“And if I tune into that, I can have access to that. And we all have the ability to do that, we all do,” she said. “But we’ve never been taught that or told that. And this is why one of my missions is to show people you have that power, you have that access.”
“I really do feel people would be happier if they knew how powerful they are, if they knew how loved they are, and if they knew that they’re supposed to live a life of joy and not want to fear,” she said. “Don’t forsake yourself.”
