Interview with Anita Moorjani
DIRK TERPSTRA: You have said: “If I’d known the truth of who I actually am, I wouldn’t have gotten cancer.” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” I believe that this is our biggest challenge. How can we practically achieve this?
Anita Moorjani: Yes, this is our biggest challenge. And one of the things I also tend to tell people is to be prepared, because when you decide that you are going to be yourself, you will often feel like you are rowing against the current. On the other hand, when you follow your heart, you can surrender to your higher self and allow who you are and allow your heart to lead you. You will lose yourself when you are constantly worried about what other people are thinking and constantly trying to fit in, always having to compete and getting ahead.
We fear failing and not being accepted and so we are constantly worried about that and we make choices based on wanting to appear more successful, appear more accepted and that’s how we lose our authenticity. You may think that the easier way to follow the heart is doing things for how they appear to be rather for who you are but in actuality you are internally killing yourself, you are going against something inside.
So you always have a choice, you either swim against yourself, your heart, or you swim against the crowd. Which one do you surrender to? I actually prefer to go with the flow of my heart. And to get back to your question, I am so grateful that I developed cancer. It was the biggest gift of my life, because it made me understand things so much better and it made me able to better relate to other people as well.
