Anita Moorjani: Sensitive Is the New Strong

Anita Moorjani is the New York Times best-selling author of What If This Is Heaven? and Dying To Be Me. She’s a beloved international speaker and has dedicated her life to empowering people’s minds and hearts with her story of courage and transformation. Before her near-death experience, she worked in the corporate world. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Danny. Her website is anitamoorjani.com, and she joins me this week to share her path. And she just published a new book, Sensitive Is the New Strong: The Power of Empaths in an Increasingly Harsh World.

Sensitive Is the New Strong – An Interview with Anita Moorjani

Interview by Victor Fuhrman

To listen to the full interview of Anita Moorjani by Victor Fuhrman on Destination Unlimited on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.

Victor Fuhrman: Thank you for joining us and sharing what I know to be an important message. So before we get into the new book, let’s talk a bit about your past. Please share with us your path before the experience that transformed your life.

Anita Moorjani: I was living in Hong Kong, and I grew up there. My parents were Indian ethnically. My parents were Hindus, but I grew up in a very multicultural society. Hong Kong is predominantly a Chinese city, but it was colonized by the British when I was growing up there.

The primary language there was English, but because most of the population was Chinese, there was also a lot of Cantonese spoken there. I grew up speaking my parent’s language, which is an Indian dialect, which we spoke at home and English, which is what we talked at school and learned to talk at school, and Chinese, which was the local language spoken by everybody, you know, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, like basically everybody.

I grew up speaking three languages simultaneously. But most of the population were either British or Chinese. And so I never felt that I fit in because I was neither British nor Chinese. I was this brown person, and I was an ethnic minority. Even in school, I got bullied because I was different and my culture was different. My parents wanted to groom me for an arranged marriage as I grew up, and I wasn’t allowed to date the way the other kids were. I wasn’t allowed to think about going to college, and all the other kids were thinking about college and careers. Then all my British friends were going to go back to the UK for their studies, for university, but I was being groomed for an arranged marriage.

What finally happened is that my parents did arrange a marriage for me, but three days before the wedding, I ran away. This brought a lot of shame to my community and my family because you just don’t do that in my culture. I was even ostracized by the Indian community. I had this fascinating life of constantly feeling that I was different and never fit in. I met a wonderful man, Danny, who is my husband today, and we met and got married.

A few years into our marriage, I had lymphoma. I found a lump on the side of my neck and had it checked. I had it biopsied, and it turned out that I had stage two lymphoma at that point. This was in 2002, and it progressed. I tried different forms of treatment, but it progressed. Then in 2006, I was literally on my deathbed. My body had completely emaciated. I had tumors the size of golf balls throughout my entire lymphatic system from the base of my skull, all around my neck, in my chest all the way down to my abdomen. I weighed 85 pounds because my body had stopped absorbing nutrition. My lungs were filled with fluid, I went into a coma, and my organs started shutting down.

The doctors told my family that these were my final hours and that I would not come back. I was not going to come out of that coma. But while I was in the coma, I was actually aware of everything around me. I was also aware that it was like a whole other world opened up, one beyond this one. I felt so at home with this, in this real another world. I felt like I was being greeted by my loved ones, deceased loved ones, and my dad, with who I had a turbulent relationship growing up. He had already passed away and crossed over. He was there to greet me, and he just wanted me to know that he loved me unconditionally. I was in a state of clarity where I learned that it was not my time to die, and I realized that I needed to come back. No part of me wanted to come back because I felt like I was enveloped in love on that side.

I just felt so free. Like all the fear was gone. The fear of the disease, cancer, the pain, the discomfort, all of that was gone when I was there. And so, no part of me wanted to come back. But then I got this clarity where I understood why I had become sick in the first place.

I understood it was that the way I lived, my thoughts, and the decisions I had made in my life had led up to that point of me lying there on the hospital bed. It was at that point, with that clarity, that I heard my dad say to me that now that you know the truth, you need to go back and live your life fearlessly!

In other words, I had this clarity and was now being given a second chance to come back and live with this clarity. And he said, “You need to live your life fearlessly,” because I had always been a fearful person. I understood that if I chose to go back into my body, my body would heal quickly. And it did! I had been in a coma for about 36 hours, and I started to come out of the coma. To the shock of everyone around me, my family, the hospital staff, and the doctors, I was able to recount conversations that they had had while I was supposedly in the coma!

I described what they had done and who had done what, and so they knew something had happened. But then the doctors were blown away when my tumors, the golf ball-sized tumors, just started to shrink. And within four or five days after coming out of the coma, they shrunk by 60 to 70%. Within five weeks, they could find no trace of cancer in my body. The challenge then started. I had to figure out how to live the rest of my life. That was in 2006, and one of the things that I discovered as I started to navigate life again was that everything that I was brought up to believe about how I needed to be and what I needed to do, and how to fit into the world was the complete opposite of what I now needed to do.

I realized that everything that I had learned, every decision, every thought, every choice I had made up to the point I got cancer is what led me to get sick. And now, I had to live my life entirely differently. And that was a challenge. That was a challenge because I realized that I am an empath, and the world we live in is not designed for empaths, and that’s why I had gotten sick.

Victor Fuhrman: You have shared all of this in your first book, Dying To Be Me. In describing your near-death experience, you said, “And then I was overwhelmed by the realization that God isn’t a being, but a state of being, and I was now in that state of being.” What was that revelation like for you?

Anita Moorjani: That revelation was compelling for me because I had always thought that God was a being, like a being in the sky, a spirit, or a person in the sky. I used to always refer to God as he. But when I was in that near-death state, I realized that when we are outside of our physical bodies, when we’re no longer expressing through our physical bodies, every one of us is pure essence. We are pure spirits. Every single one of us is a facet of God. Sometimes when speaking about it, I use this analogy. I like analogies because it’s so hard to describe what it’s like on the other side. The analogy I use is, imagine those mirrored balls, those disco balls, like back in the ’70s.

Discos always had these big mirror balls, mosaic mirror balls on the ceiling. These mirror balls would refract light onto the walls, and on the walls, there were these separate tiny dots or circles of light that would be all around the room. Each one of those specks of light on the wall was the spark of each of us and our physical expression. Many of of us believe we’re a separate being because each of those specks of light on the wall looks separate from the other. But each one of those specks of light is actually refraction from one of the mirror tiles on the ball. And every tile is connected to make the whole mirror ball. When you die, you realize, “Oh my God, I am a mirror tile on this mirror ball, and all of us tiles together are all connected to make this ball, and this ball is God.” And so that’s the best analogy I can think of. When I express through the physical body, it’s like the tile telling itself as that speck of light on the wall. When I am that speck of light on the wall, I forget that I am connected to that mirror ball, that I’m actually a reflection of God. When actually me and every other person or every speck of light here, we are expressions of that mirror ball.

Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Anita Moorjani