Dying to Heal – Anita Moorjani’s Unusual Cancer Treatment for Stage 4 Lymphoma

Part 1 of a 2-Part Series

Do you believe someone can heal from stage 4 cancer in a matter of days? I was skeptical too. I interviewed Anita Moorjani last fall and learned that while in a coma, Anita had a near-death experience (NDE) that awakened her to a new view of life and of herself, thus facilitating a miraculous recovery from stage 4 lymphoma. After the interview, the questions ‘how could she recover so quickly?’ and 'what can we learn from this?' kept running through my head. My rational mind needed an explanation. In these articles I explore possible explanations for her unbelievably rapid recovery, including how Anita explains the miracle of her healing. I also outline some unique views on how and why deep healing takes place. I put forth the notion of the role, or the higher purpose, disease can play by helping us to discover what we need to do in order to expedite the healing process and render the cancer extraneous.

Anita Moorjani’s story is an amazing one and includes how she both contributed to and then healed from her stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. During my interview with her (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSV_n00boSs), she told me about being taken to the hospital after slipping into a coma as her organs started shutting down due to the cancer ravaging her body – including lemon-sized tumors in her core and lesions all over her skin caused by toxins that her body was releasing. It was during the coma that she had a near-death experience (NDE) after which she came back and healed in a matter of days – astounding all her doctors and family members! Think about it, less than a week after her NDE the tests showed that she was cancer-free. The doctors could not even find lymph nodes large enough to biopsy! In order to better understand the context of her recovery I am going to start with what led up to her cancer diagnosis.

Living in Fear

Anita openly admits that she was driven by fear in many aspects of her life, “I was fearful of not being good enough and of not fitting in”. In terms of her health, she talks about her obsession with eating the right foods and doing the right things in order to avoid cancer and other illnesses. Anita realizes now that there was not enough focus on finding pleasure in what she did to take care of herself. Her focus was on avoiding what she feared rather than finding healthy and enjoyable ways to support her well-being. As we all know, fear can be a crippling emotion. It can monopolize our thoughts and leave us feeling vulnerable or even powerless. It can also wreak havoc in other aspects of our life; disturbing our sleep, our moods and resulting in elevated levels of stress. Over the long term, this negative stress can weaken the immune response and affect our ability to stay healthy.

Pleasing Everyone but Herself

Anita was also a self-confessed people pleaser. After coming out of her coma and NDE, she realized that her life had been centered on doing things for others in order to feel accepted and to not be of any trouble to anyone. There had been little concern about what would please her. She laments, “I thought it was selfish to love myself”. During her NDE she said that she felt heightened awareness of her own feelings and emotions. This was an unusual sensation for her and helped her realize that throughout her life she had been out of touch with her emotions. Growing up, her individual needs were not valued. Like many of us, she was not taught to really listen to, respect and love herself.

Taking Responsibility for Her Cancer

According to Louise Hay (cancer thriver, metaphysical lecturer and teacher, author and publisher), the underlying cause of all disease is a lack of self-love. In her book You Can Heal Your Life (Hay House Inc. 1984), which has sold over 35 million copies, Louise links lymph problems to the need to re-center the mind on the essentials of life – love and joy. This notion supports Anita’s premise that in focusing her energy on pleasing and looking after the needs of others, she neglected the key ingredient of self-love. The lack of self-love, combined with her overwhelming fears, led her to the conclusion that she actually brought on her cancer. Those who believe in the law of attraction would likely agree. This law purports that what we focus on expands and becomes more present in our life. So even if Anita was concerned about avoiding cancer, her fear and other negative thoughts were unconsciously feeding and energizing the notion of getting cancer. Using the law of attraction to our benefit in a situation like this would mean consciously focusing our attention and energy on joy, love, health and well-being instead of falling into an avoidance or fear-based mindset.

This does not mean that she, or anyone else with cancer, has to feel guilty or blame him or her self. It is not about blame, it is about acceptance and ownership, which play an important and somewhat surprising function in the healing process - they are actually empowering. If we can see that we played a contributing role in bringing cancer into our life, it follows that by changing how we think and act, we can contribute to our own healing.

Her Near Death Revelation

It was on the night of Feb. 2^nd 2006 that Anita went into a coma and her family was told she had only hours to live. During her NDE she was faced with the choice of coming back or accepting her imminent death. Her dilemma was essentially whether to continue on a journey towards pure light and love (in the afterworld we apparently experience feelings of complete love that are so overwhelmingly wonderful, like nothing we have ever felt before) or return to her diseased and dying body. The easy choice would have been to stay in that place of pure bliss, except that during her NDE she learned that her true essence is pure love. She now says, “at our core, we are all pure love” – what a great belief for all of us to adopt! However, we can read these words and intellectually agree (or not) but the cool thing is that she truly experienced that state of pure love. In that moment, she made a major shift in consciousness – likely similar to what one would experience when one becomes enlightened. From this new place of consciousness, she claims that, “only when I love myself can I love others”. Her new perspective confirms that self-love is anything but selfish! Before deciding whether to return or not, she received the following insight from her deceased father, “now that you know the truth of who you are, your body will reflect this truth and be healed. Go back and live your life fearlessly”. So she made the courageous decision to come back into her body and to reclaim her life.

The NDE gave her newfound confidence because she was blessed with the realization of her own magnificence. She understood for the first time that she did not have to try to be anyone else but who she is. She now realizes that being her true self is her unique and wonderful gift to the world. In retrospect, she sees this concept as so simple yet to truly embrace such a profound truth is something that most of us find difficult. This truth gave her the courage to share her insights and experience with the world, which is a big part of her life purpose. She describes an important element in being able to fully embrace her purpose as, “to be myself, to be true to who I am”.

 In part two of this article I will explore possible explanations, including Anita's views of her rapid recovery.