JJ: Welcome to the show, Anita!

Anita: Thanks, JJ, for having me on. I’m really happy to be here today.

JJ: I’m very honored to have you. I’ve known about your story since probably Wayne Dyer brought you into his circle of influence back in, what, 2006, 2007?

Anita: He discovered me in 2011.

JJ: Okay.

Anita: Yeah.

JJ: I felt like it wasn’t that long ago. I know your NDE was before that, and there was some momentum created before he found your story and then reached out to you. And then you came on his radio show, I know, unannounced. And then you did that. And you wrote the book, and you published the book. And so I remember you, but I didn’t know how far back that was. So that was 2011, and we’re now in 2020. Okay. Nine years ago.

Anita: Yeah.

JJ: And I remember hearing about your story. And at the time, there wasn’t anyone in my life necessarily, or how we had different stages of when we’re ready to hear information or when we’re ready to connect. And so I remember knowing about you, and at that point, thought, “Okay, well, whenever I’m ready to know more about this story, I know where to find her.” And your book was also brought up recently. My partner Doug, who you met at the Fireworks, his brother had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and passed in March of last year. And somebody else brought up your book. And Doug had said to me, “Well, maybe I should get that for my brother to read.” And I said, “Okay.” And then that was sort of the end of that. And I don’t think that happened.

And then fast forward, my last interview with Dr. Eben Alexander, which was published last week, he definitely recommended that everyone know about your story, and that you were such a model of healing. Because he and I talked about the power of healing and what had happened in his NDE. And so I know that from listening to your book, I listened to it on audio, I’ve watched your TED Talk, I’ve watched a bunch of your videos, so I feel very ingrained, and I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of your perspective on many things. So what I’d like to do today is take some of the best of that for the people who are listening, for my show, if that’s okay. And then I have some questions from some listeners for you as well that we can cover. Is that okay?

Anita: That sounds amazing. I love it.

JJ: Good. Now, I do teach, for lack of a better focus, law of attraction. And there was nothing that I found in anything that you said that was incongruent. In fact, I said to Dr. Alexander on our first interview, “I think your NDE is a perfect example of law of attraction.” It’s like the most perfect. And when we talked about it, he was like, “Oh, I never thought about it that way.” And so, a lot of my community kind of comes from that background or understanding, wants to know more, wants to feel what I think, regardless of how it’s interpreted, what the truth might be of it, which was, I think, your experience of what life is, which is that we’re all universal beings. We’re all connected. We’re all pure love. And we’re all having a physical experience, but we’re all always nonphysical. And we don’t really die. We just sort of go back into nonphysical. Would that be accurate as to what your experience was?

Anita: Yes, it would be accurate. And I love that you mentioned law of attraction because there are certain things that people misunderstand about law of attraction, and they use the misunderstanding and try and apply it to their healing, and it doesn’t work. So it would be great to unpack all of that. I love everything you said.

JJ: I would love to, because I heard you. I feel like I’m going to cry, because I feel like you captured in your story in the first book, and I heard it. And again, because I’m sort of my gifts, my talents, who I really am is a little bit of the analyzer. But I’m a Pisces like you. I’m a feeler. And it was bridging the gap between that left and right brain. It was taking an idea and understanding and being conscious and being present, and then making sense of it and figuring out. Like you talked about beliefs. Sorry, I’m getting a little teary-eyed.

Anita: That’s good. That’s a good thing.

JJ: It is a good thing because we’re bringing some worlds together for me. And in this show, I really, like you, want to empower people to be and to be loved and to be who they are. And all the other stuff, all of the use of all the tools I have (astrology, law of attraction, left brain, right brain, nonviolent communication), all the tools that I use are really just to create clarity and freedom. They’re not to make anyone feel badly. They’re not meant to make anyone misunderstand and blame themselves or carry guilt or fear. It’s actually to be the opposite. It’s to create freedom, not fear.

Anita: Yeah.

JJ: So before we get down the rabbit hole too far of law of attraction, and I want to emphasize on this interview, I loved your TED Talk. I’d like to give people who don’t know you, who aren’t aware of your story. I’d love to give them, if we could do a condensed version of your TED Talk. I want to go over the five points towards the end of the interview, but I want the story. But I’m going to say right now, for all of you, we’re not going to cover everything, and so I would really, really beg you, please buy or listen to Anita’s book, because a lot of the questions that you ask me to ask her, she answers in the book. So I want to use today to do things that we haven’t talked about yet. I want to explore deeper aspects and ideas so you really can get well-rounded information and feel trust, feel peace, feel a deeper knowing, feel a sense of surrender with trust that I think we can achieve today. So please get her book. Please listen to it. Also watch her TED Talk. It’s 18 minutes. It’s beautiful. We’re going to go over some of it here. But today is going to be geared towards taking this to a new conversation and to hopefully inspire all of you to know and trust that what she has experienced will benefit your life as well. So, Anita, please tell us about your NDE.

Anita: Okay. So, I’m going to condense it really short so that we can get into all the other cool stuff. Basically, I had lymphoma for four years, and towards the end of the four years, I had reached what they called end stage lymphoma. So it was the final stage. So it was beyond stage four in that my muscles had atrophied. I could not walk anymore. I weighed 85 pounds. My body was no longer absorbing nutrition. I was so weak I couldn’t even hold my head up. My head would be hanging down like this. I would either be in a wheelchair or I would be lying in bed. But I couldn’t lie flat because my lungs were filled with fluid, and so I had to be propped up, otherwise I would choke on my own fluid. I had open skin lesions. I had tumors throughout my lymphatic system, many of them the size of golf balls, from the base of my skull, all around my neck, under my arm, in my breasts, all the way down to my abdomen. There was a lot more on my left side than my right side, but they were the size of golf balls.

So, on February the 2nd 2006, I fell into a coma, and the doctors told my family that these were my final hours, my organs had now shut down, and that I was not going to come out of the coma. And so my family gathered around me, and my brother flew in. So this was happening to me in a hospital, in one of the top oncology hospitals in Hong Kong. I was in the intensive care unit, and my mom and my husband were around me. My brother was flying in from India. And so, people were being told that these were literally my final hours.

Unbeknownst to everyone around me, even though my physical body was in a coma and my eyes were closed, I was having an out-of-body experience. I was able to see my body lying on that hospital bed, but I was able to see, feel, hear, and experience a lot more than just what was happening around my body. Because without my physical body, it was like I was limitless. It was like I had 360-degree peripheral vision. So it’s not like you’re looking at things through your physical eyes where you have to turn your head and focus. No. It was pure awareness. It was like I was aware of everything that was happening to my body. I was aware of my family. I was aware of what the doctors were saying, not just within the room around my body, but outside the room. I could hear them, see them.

And then I felt like I was kind of expanding and going further. And so much happened, but in the short version, I encountered my dad who had passed away 10 years prior. And the thing is I felt nothing but unconditional love from my dad. When I was growing up, I had a very turbulent relationship with him. But I started to realize that when we leave our bodies, so basically being in this out-of-body space and expanding, it felt like a realm of clarity, like I understood things that I never knew before. And one of those things is I realized that in this space, there is only unconditional love. And that’s what I was feeling from my dad and for my dad, even though I had always had a turbulent relationship with him. All of that was just gone. It was dissolved. It was like when we die, we don’t just leave behind our physical bodies, but we also leave behind our culture, our gender, our beliefs, all these layers of even anger, and all these things that we accumulate over a lifetime. And they all get left behind. Even our religions, all of it gets left behind. And what crosses over is just our pure essence, our pure soul. We can call it pure love or pure god.

And so here I was in the other realm, my pure essence and my dad’s pure essence. And so none of that conflict that we used to have or turbulence that we used to have, none of it existed in that realm. And so, what I started to understand while I was there was I started to also understand how it was that I got cancer, why it was that I was lying in that hospital bed dying. My life made sense to me. And I reached a point where I realized that I had a choice as to whether to go back into my physical body or to go onward into death. Now, I felt so amazing there. I felt so vibrant and free. And I felt like I was surrounded by a feeling of unconditional love. And that love, we can call it anything. We can call it God or coming from the angels or our guides. But it’s not one specific thing. It’s so limitless there. I realized that God is not a being, but God is that love energy that I was just surrounded and bathed in. And it could be the collective energy of all of us. It’s so hard to put it into words.

But no part of me wanted to come back into my physical body, and I wanted to stay there. But I felt my dad was encouraging me to come back, and he was encouraging me to realize that now that I knew the truth, that if I chose to go back, my physical body would heal very, very quickly. And I was reluctant to come back, but finally I did because my dad wanted me to know that I had these gifts waiting for me. And he also wanted me to know that my husband Danny, who was here on the other side (he was by my bedside), that his and my purpose was linked. And if I didn’t come back, he wouldn’t be able to complete his purpose either. So all these elements made me choose to come back.

There was another really important piece. One of the things I realized was that my entire life, I had made all my choices from a place of fear, and it was that fear that contributed to me making myself smaller and weaker and ultimately getting the cancer. I also realized that a big reason for my fear was my dad, and he had always made me feel smaller or lesser than who I am, and I always feared being myself. The final words my dad said to me to get me to cross back over to this side was “Now that you know who you are, go back and live your life fearlessly.” And that’s the point at which I came out of the coma and started coming back into my physical body. My dad, who had instilled a fear in me during my lifetime, actually broke that spell of fear during my death and wanted me to come back and live a life without that fear.

And when I started to come out of the coma, I started to tell everybody around me what had happened. I said, “Dad is there. I’m not going to die.” And the doctors couldn’t believe what I was saying. They said it was the drugs. But I started to say things that I couldn’t possibly know. I said to Danny, actually, something like “Isn’t that the doctor who said I’m not even going to make it through the night?” And Danny said, “But that doctor said it outside the room. He didn’t even say it in the room. How could you have heard it?” And then there was a doctor that walked in who had never treated me until I’d gone in the coma, but when he walked in the room, I recognized him and I said, “Hey, good afternoon, Dr. Chan,” and he said, “How do you know who I am?” and I said, “Didn’t you come in and remove fluid from my lungs?” and he said, “But you were in a coma. You couldn’t possibly have seen me.”

So they started to realize something weird had happened. But four to five days after coming out of the coma, I wanted to sit up. I wanted to eat. I wanted them to start removing all the tubes. And the doctors started noticing the tumors were shrinking rapidly, and within a week, the tumors were down by about 70%. And over the weeks, they just kept shrinking. And the doctors were doing all their tests and they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The radiologist who was doing the tests, he thought he was getting the wrong patient’s reports to do the comparison. He actually had to call back the record center to say, “Have you sent me the right reports? Because this is not possible.” Within three and a half weeks, they could find no trace of cancer. I was just building up my physical body and my strength and my muscles and trying to gain weight so that I would have the strength to be independent again. But after five and a half weeks of entering the hospital, they released me to go home and live my life cancer-free. And that was in 2006, and it’s now 2020, so it’s 14 years.

JJ: Again, she goes over all of this, for those of you that are hearing this for the first time, obviously in much depth of all of the different little synchronicities, if you will, more stories and her experience through that amazing story in her book. So, like I said, please don’t let this be the only time you get to hear Anita. Just like with Dr. Alexander, I didn’t think I needed to read his book after I saw him on Super Soul Sunday. And my therapist I was working with at the time, colleague as well, said to me, “No, it’s a beautiful journey.” And so I think yours too. What I loved about when I was listening to you, because I did it on audio, two things that really became very powerful, cellular to me. And again, part of this is because I learned some things, I’ve learned and expanded in my timeframe and on my journey. And every time I hear of an NDE, I have a certain understanding, I think, of what’s on the other side, which is what you’ve experienced, even though I haven’t been there, even though I haven’t done it. But it always has resonated with me. All of the teachings that I got from law of attraction that you’re the creator of your own reality, that we’re all source energy. I know there’s not a God that’s separate from us. I know we’re all source energy. So all of those concepts expand my body as I think about it. I feel this immense… What was really amazing to listen to you was when you talked about you felt yourself blending into everything in the room. Not only did you have the 360 view. Your body didn’t exist. It was almost as if you and everything was one. 

JJ: And that feeling that I got from listening to that was just I would love for everyone to feel that. And I’m going to jump around a little bit because I want to take the momentum from where we are right now. Because I know you tried everything. You had done so many different healings and modalities and eating this and not eating that. What would have worked? And I know that the point is nothing would have worked. You were supposed to have gone through this, correct?

Anita: Yes. For me, that is the case. And yet the dichotomy is that I feel if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had to go through what I went through, which is why I share with people what I know now.

JJ: And how would that have been delivered to you, though? For me, I interpret my first time hearing Abraham say “You are the creator of your own reality,” I didn’t have any guilt or shame or blame attached to that. That felt freeing. That felt empowering. That felt expansive. When I heard that I’m source energy, I felt expansive. I felt free. So, what would have had to have happened, do you think? I mean, would you have listened to someone like you then who had a similar experience?

Anita: I would have listened to someone like me because the way that I present things is the way I would have liked it to be presented to me back then when I was going through what I was going through. So what was happening back then was when I was dealing with the illness, I was dealing with two camps, which was really, really confusing for me. There was all the people who were really, really pro or immersed in allopathic medicine, the whole oncology “do the scan, have the chemo, the radiation.” And that scared me to death. So I was dealing with people who were saying, “If you don’t do this, you’re crazy. You have to do it this way.” And then I was dealing with another camp of people because I was kind of immersed in a world where I was into experimenting with natural alternative stuff. So I have the people in the alternative world saying to me, “You absolutely should not be putting the toxins in your body,” and so I was fearing the toxins of the chemotherapy and everything, trying to go the alternative way. But as I would go the alternative way, I would still have all these people saying to me, “You’re crazy. All that is quackery. It’s not real. It’s not true.”

So my mind was in this state of fear that if I did the allopathic way, I feared it. If I did the alternative way, I was fearing that “Am I doing the wrong thing?” because that’s what everybody is kind of brainwashing me to believe that all of this is quackery. But that was the way I was attracted to, but I didn’t have the confidence to go that way. So I lived in this state of fear. And so, even when I would do the alternative stuff, I would be doing it in a way like I needed to prove to the other people that “No, it works.” And I was like, “Please make it work,” and “I have to take all these supplements, and I have to cut this out of my diet.” And it was rigid, and it was fearful, and it was just horrible. But I was doing all the alternatives. But my state of mind, my state of being, I was in an awful and fearful state.

And I know that people relate to this when I speak about it. You can be doing all the right things, following all the right therapies that the alternatives tell you to follow, but you’re still in that state of fear, like “Am I doing the right thing? Is the cancer still growing inside me? Oh my god.” So the way I deliver my message now is I tell people that the disease in you, let’s not label it. Let’s not even call it cancer. Let’s not call it anything. It’s your own body trying to communicate with you. And usually the message is you don’t love yourself enough. For me, that was the message. I never knew that I was supposed to love myself. And when I say love myself, a lot of people think, “Oh, I do love myself. I take care of myself. I go to the hairdresser. I go to the gym.” No, that’s not loving yourself. You have to love your whole self, your soul, your spirit. You have to love your spirit and soul enough to know that it came here for a reason, for a purpose. It is guided all the time. You have to love your physical body to know that because your spirit has a purpose to be here, it wants a beautiful, healthy vessel to express itself through. I was someone who suppressed my spirit. I suppressed me so much and dimmed my light so much that my spirit was trying to communicate with me and tell me “Hey, let me out.” That’s what it was for me.

JJ: So I love what you just said there about fearing. You didn’t fully trust because you weren’t confident and you felt like you had to second-guess. And that is why when I wrote my first book, Fit 2 Love, I come from a fitness background, first and foremost. I come from a health background. But I intuitively knew that many of the people in the fitness industry or in the health industry are driven by fear.

Anita: Yes.

JJ: They’re driven by fear and control issues and addiction to how I look and addiction to what other people think of me. And that is never how I did it. In fact, my Fit 2 Love book was about how I manifested my husband back then and how I used self-care practices to be the light so I attracted into and I allowed into the person who was supposed to be there in that time. Now, of course, since then, I’ve learned so much. He was the catalyst for everything that’s been happening today and the lessons I learned in that situation. And I couldn’t find the word for it at the time, but it was really shame. It doesn’t matter if it’s western medicine or eastern medicine or alternative medicine. It’s about that energy underneath, whether it’s coming from love or coming from fear or coming from shaming or from guilt tripping or from controlling.

And so, I wrote the book with wanting to help people not shame them. People would hear fitness and taking care of your body and loving your body as “I’m not thin enough. I don’t look good enough,” and attaching that to their self-worth. So I’m like, “No. I want you to exercise because you want to love your body, because you want to take care of it, because you want this vessel to be the strongest, best it can be through this life experience.” The aging and decline is a choice. You can allow it to happen, and that’s fine. But you can also decide, “I don’t want to have all these pains. I don’t want to have all these things deteriorate in my body. I have a choice. I can do something else now to help the rest of my experience while I’m here for me to stay strong.”

And my evolution is from this to then allowing myself to step into Spirit, Purpose, and Energy, and teach law of attraction and talk about spiritual things and connect all the dots and use behavioral sciences. And I think as I’m listening to it, because I just want to weep, I think as I’m here, I’m thinking, “What is going on with me?” And I think it’s because it goes back to one of the things we’re going to cover that you said in your TED Talk that you just said right now, which is to be yourself fearlessly. And you get these messages that we’re too much. I mean, Jesus, I have so many fire planets. I am very confronting for people sometimes. But it’s my love. It’s how I deliver love sometimes. And some people don’t receive it as love because their own internal ways that they interpret things take it as shame or guilt. And it’s never meant for that.

Anita: Yeah.

JJ: I see people’s brightness. I see their potential, their lightness. Get rid of all those things that you keep carrying with you. You don’t need them. But it’s interpreted sometimes not in the way that I want to, so in life, I have sort of been very gingerly, slowly stepping more and more into who I really am. And like you, I had a condition, although it wasn’t cancer. I had fibroids, which, by now, when this show is being aired, people know more about where to find out about my story. And I use both. I beat myself up for why I couldn’t heal myself, but I, every step of the way, listened to my body and what it needed, and I followed it. And in the end, I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted a procedure that wasn’t surgery. I dealt with doctors who told me things that I did not believe and did not agree with at all. But at the end of the day, I had to go through it to realize, “Did I fail not healing myself?” and then I realized that I went through this to help other women not…I was told to have a hysterectomy. It was like a 5% chance. And I looked at this doctor, thinking “Are you kidding me?” I wasn’t in shock. I was very calm. She said, “Hysterectomies are overprescribed, but I think that would be the first choice.” I went in looking for a particular procedure, and I basically didn’t want to look at the MRIs, and I just wanted yes or no. “Will you do the procedure or not?” and she said, “I will, but it’s not my first recommendation.” And I wasn’t really even open to her first recommendation, so when she said hysterectomy, I said, “Not going to happen.”

But I would go through this experience with as much education and knowledge and experience as I have in the health industry, in all aspects of healing, from the physical and emotional and spiritual to all the scientific things about whatever in my body. And I thought to myself, “Oh my god. So many women sit in this chair, and a doctor tells them and scares them into thinking that they need to do this very extreme thing.” And so, I feel like my purpose at the end of that was to help other women not give up body parts they don’t need to.

Anita: Exactly.

JJ: Because somebody wants to infuse them into fear.

Anita: Yes.

JJ: So I’m relating to the journey of I had to go through this to get here, in order to help other people save their body parts, women save their uteruses (it’s unnecessary), to understand all of the emotional pieces to integrate that fear, to take ownership of “Yes, I have not allowed myself to be who I really am.” Because for pretty much everybody else, I’m too much. “Oh, your ideas are very strong. Your personality is very strong.” And so that has led me to sort of tiptoe around it. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I had fibroids in the first place: not allowing my creativity to flow.

So, let’s talk about how you would recommend for people who are… Because I think I’m very confident. I know myself very well. I’ve had a great life. I had great support, even though in that support, they still didn’t know what to do with me. They had no tools or skills to handle me or to guide me. So it’s sort of been me trying to figure it out on my own. What would you tell me and everyone else listening and yourself back then how to get that confidence and letting go of the fear? What are the practical things someone can do to allow themselves to step into who they really are and be their true selves, even though they’re probably going to get some slack from other people? What would you tell them?

Anita: There’s so many things I would tell them, knowing what I know today. And I relate to everything you’re saying because I attract a lot of people who have been told… There was one woman who said she was diagnosed with stage zero breast cancer and her oncologist was suggesting she have a mastectomy. I said, “No, that’s really crazy. You cannot do that. Don’t give up your body parts.” So I know exactly what you’re saying. So, first of all, if they’re dealing with a disease, what I want them to know is that you need to choose the treatment that makes you feel empowered. Feeling empowered is an act of self-love. If you’re feeling fearful, then the doctor or the person who is treating you is not the right person for you. You need to work with people who make you feel empowered, and you need to know that choosing the right people is an act of self-love. Whether it’s alternative, whether it’s allopathic, whether it’s a combination, you need to feel empowered through the process of dealing with whatever physical symptoms you’re dealing with. So, that’s number one I want people to know if they are going through physical issues or disease or anything like that. I go into it so much more not just in my book, but in many of my YouTube videos and all that. 

But the other thing I want people to know is that we live in a world that is created by people who believe that we are five-sensory beings. And I may need to repeat this for the listeners to really get this. We are actually not five-sensory beings. We are more than that. We are not three-dimensional beings. We’re more than that. That’s what death taught me. Death taught me that we are more than our physical bodies. I know many of your listeners know this. You kind of know we’re spiritual beings. But I really want you to get what this really means. So, let’s say we are six- or more sensory beings and we are actually four- or more dimensional beings, but we live in a world that is created by people who believe they are five-sensory, three-dimensional beings, and it’s created for people who are five-sensory, three-dimensional beings. So in other words, the world is conducive for people who are five-sensory beings. But you are not. You, the listener. Chances are, because you’re listening to JJ, you’re watching this, you are not a five-sensory being. You are more than that. And so you probably have trouble fitting into this world. Self-love means getting to know that part of you that does not fit into this world and loving it and knowing there’s a reason why you are the way you are.

An analogy I’d like to use is an iceberg. If you imagine an iceberg, when you look at an iceberg, when you look at a photo of an iceberg when people take pictures, and we think, “Oh my god. Look at that amazing iceberg,” in actuality, what you’re looking at is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the water, what you don’t see is the iceberg is actually much bigger than what you can see. In other words, what you’re only seeing is 10%, at the most 15% or 20%, of the actual iceberg. 80% or 90% of the iceberg is under the surface, and you can’t even see it. This is the same for you and me. What you can see, what I can see of you, what you can see of me, is only 10% of who I am and 10% of who you are. There is 80% or 90% of you which we cannot see. And yet we live in a world that ignores that 80% or 90%. You have to start acknowledging that 80% or 90% that you’ve been ignoring.

“What is my soul? What did it come here to be? Why did it choose this path? Why did it choose these parents?” Start going back and getting to know that soul. Give yourself a hug, even if it makes you cry as you think back on your journey of how your soul came into this life and embraced this life and has gone through whatever it has gone through to get to where it is here. If it makes you cry, it’s a good thing. But you need to go on a journey internally to discover your soul, and follow the trajectory of your soul from birth, and ask yourself questions like “Why did you choose this?” And you will start to gain clarity as to kind of the path or the patterns in your life. And you will start to gain clarity as to things that you have ignored and not listened to.

So, here’s the big part of it. When you start to realize that there is a big part of you that you have ignored, and that is the soul that has come through and decided to express itself through this body, but the soul is way bigger than the body. When you start to realize that, you realize how powerful you are. But what we have done is, instead of embracing that power, embracing that soul that has a purpose, and instead of honoring the purpose that the soul has come here to express, what we have instead done is reduced it to thinking, “All I am is this five-sensory being.” And then what we do is we feel insecure and then we give our power away to other people. We ask other people to tell us what’s wrong with us and tell us what we need to do about it instead of checking in with that 80% or 90% of us who actually knows the real truth. We never check in with that. So I always tell people, “Turn inward. Meditate if you have to. Go for a walk in nature.” But really get to know that you are more than this physical body. 

The other issue I have is that whenever we have a physical issue, we think that all it is is a physical issue. In actuality, our physical body is an expression of that soul. So every illness is actually more spiritual, something our spirit is trying to tell us. The issue I have with, of course, allopathic or conventional healthcare is that they purely look at the physical. They don’t look any further than that. But I also have that issue with a lot of alternative, where it’s a lot better, they don’t give you drugs and pharmaceuticals, they give you natural remedies, you do it through food, but they still only look at the physical. They still look at your physical symptoms and say, “This is what you need to do with your diet.”

Now, I don’t undermine that, but the point is you still haven’t gotten to know that “I am so much more than the physical. Let me heal it from the soul level.” And when you start healing it from the soul level and you start to grow more passionate about your life, and you have more love for your life, what happens is you gravitate towards starting to keep your body healthier and doing those things of health, but more from a place of love: a love for myself, a love for my soul, a love for my purpose, my life, because I’ve gotten to know my soul. And so you start to do things that are healthy for your body because you want your soul to have a healthy vessel through which to express itself.

The other way, the way we’re currently doing it as five-sensory beings is “Oh my god. I’ve got these symptoms. I’ve got to go see a naturopath because I don’t want the drugs in my body.” The naturopath tells me, “Oh, you need to take all these supplements.” It’s still very five-sensory. It’s like “Oh, let me take these supplements,” and then there’s this fear. “Is it clearing these symptoms? Is it not?” And so you’re still feeling that stress and fear of the symptoms. Fear actually weighs down on your immune system. It actually slows down your energy supply to your immune system. And you need your immune system when you’re healing. So I always say, “Make your choices from a place of love and not fear.” And the first thing to do, before you even love your physical body, is to love your soul.

So, that whole thing was my long way of saying step number one is to know that you are more than a five-sensory physical being, and love that part of you that is not physical. Step number one is to love your soul. Step number two: know that your soul is expressing itself through this body. And you need to keep the body healthy so that your soul can continue to express itself through the body. That’s what I would say.

JJ: Beautiful. I do an event called Releasing What Weighs You Down. And even though this will be published long after the last one happened, which is this coming weekend, I’ve got a book that I use called “Messages from the Body,” and I link every ailment to a psychological and emotional set point for the body. In fact, last night, I was having a little bit of a restless leg syndrome. I got out of bed. I came over here. I sat down with the book, and I was like, “Okay, what’s going on?” because I didn’t know what it was in my awareness. So I sat with that. I did some EFTs, some emotional freedom techniques and tapping on any of the fears that were coming up for me about all the things that were going on this week, and just being in the moment of that. It took about 10 to 15 minutes. I think I had some tears. And then I went to bed, and it went away.

Anita: Wow.

JJ: Because a lot of times, I have clients that have, let’s say, back pain. In fact, one of them has been working with me for eight years. And from the beginning, I’ve said to this particular client, who has been on this show now (he’s had his transformation), that this is an emotional issue, not a physical issue. But most people don’t understand how to link those together, especially men. They hear emotional and they go, “I don’t understand what that means.”

Anita: Yeah.

JJ: And I realize, “Oh, it’s stress.” So let me reframe that for you. It’s stress. “Oh, I have stress.” Right. So the stress, which is emotions, you can’t have stress without having negative emotions, unless it’s physical. You’re building your body up. But having that link, and taking somebody through eight years, you finally, after eight years, went, “Oh, I have to really take into consideration my feelings and what’s going on for me, and what am I holding on to, and where am I shortchanging myself?” And so, I think that that’s a perfect message to reinforce for everybody that, again, to me, you look at all the pieces, and it’s all the pieces together. For Fit 2 Love, for me, it’s not about that you take care of your body and that’s it, and that all exercise and forms of eating are healthy. Not if it’s from an addictive point of shaming yourself.

Anita: Exactly.

JJ: You can be taking care of your body and think, “Look at me. I work out seven days a week, and I’m doing all the right things.” Yet underneath, you’re doing it because you don’t like yourself.

Anita: Exactly.

JJ: And so you’re not going to end up in a better place because the energy of why you’re doing it is still a disconnection from who you really are, and a disconnection from that channel of love that you are of source energy. So it’s again coming from that place. In fact, I even started a mastermind this year on finances, on building health and wealth, and starting a show called Health and Wealth, because I’m wanting to come from the place of, for years, “Follow these people. They know how to make a lot of money.” Okay, but they’re also sick. They have bad relationships. They’re not happy people. It’s not one thing. How about can we figure out a way to make all of it work together? And to me, it was what you’re talking about. It’s coming inward. It’s really acknowledging. It’s a cellular connecting with who you really are and that source energy, and being guided. And whether it’s your subconscious mind, source energy, God, yourself, whatever the message comes, being able to be present enough and conscious enough to allow yourself to be guided. So, for me, that’s how law of attraction is: get into alignment and follow the impulse. End of story, right?

Anita: Yeah.

JJ: That’s it. I mean, yes, there’s much more other things people want to talk about, but really that’s life. You get into alignment, you feel like pure love, and you follow the impulse. And you take actions that are inspired by that impulse, and there you go. And that’s where you’re co-creating at all times with the greater part of who you are, underneath the iceberg, and you’re always in alignment, and you’re radiating love and freedom. And in that kind of house and container, disease cannot exist.

Anita: Yes.

JJ: And I wanted to just make sure I get this in, because I did post that I was interviewing you, and many people had questions. For those of you that were people that posted some of your questions, the questions that can be answered by the book, I’m just going to continue to encourage you so I can use this time on other things. Okay. So, this is someone who said, “I listen to Anita Moorjani’s ‘Dying to be Me’ while being treated for stage one ovarian cancer. It was such a breath of fresh air and gave me hope and confidence that all would be well. I went on to have another cancer diagnosis and then a bone marrow disorder. Thankfully, I am well, and I’m so fond of Anita Moorjani’s messages. My question would be if she has any suggestions on handling a fear of reoccurrence. It does creep up on me usually when it’s time for the checkups. Thanks.” 

Anita: This is a bone of contention I have with allopathic or conventional medicine is that they kind of never release you from that grip of fear. And because I view the world differently today, I don’t see the world the same way I did before the near death experience. I see us as being energetic beings first, and physical beings after, as a vessel to express this energy through. And what happens is that as energetic beings, when we’re in a state of love, our energy grows. And what does love mean? Love means passion, purpose, and all these different things. So being in a state of love is when you are following your calling, when you’re passionate about something, when you’re in love, when you love yourself. All of these increase your energy. So if we are all energetic beings, when you’re in a state of love, your energy is increased. This means, as I said, even if you have found your purpose and you are following it passionately.

When you are in a state of fear, so what is fear? Fear is lack of self-esteem, self-hatred, shame, guilt, anger, all of these things. These emotions kind of reduce our energy field. So they shrink our energy. So, if we are in an expanded state of energy for a prolonged period of time, our bodies start to heal. And this is something you won’t learn in medicine, but this is what I discovered. If I had to give you one key of what healed me, it was being in that expanded state of energy. Suddenly I was in this immensely expanded state of energy, and my body just started to heal. Even when I came out of it, I felt like “Oh my god. I figured it out. I know what it is.” And my physical body started to heal.

So, what I would ask you to do, if you are in fear of your illness, number one is don’t fear the fear. Allow those thoughts to pass. But then what I want you to do is, after that, don’t push them away. They’re there. But where I want you to take your focus is I want you to start thinking of a purpose for your life. I want you to think of a life beyond the diagnosis. Personally, when I deal with people, I don’t even use the word “cancer” because there’s so much fear to it. And even hearing that word brings your energy field down. So when you think about it, looking at it from my perspective, when I see everybody as energy beings, and the objective of this life is to keep your energy as high as possible, that is really all your objective is: to keep your energy as high as possible and to reduce the amount of things that decrease your energy, which, as I said, was fear, stress, shame. Reduce those as much as possible, and increase everything that expands your energy.

To me, it’s ironic that our very medical system instills this fear in someone like you, this fear of cancer, fear of reoccurrence and having to go for checkups and all. The very system instills this fear in you, which reduces your energy. But you need that energy for your body to actually go into this healing mode. So your job is to focus on doing whatever it takes to expand your energy. And this could be anything: following your passion, doing the stuff you love, being with people you love, going out with friends, laughing, doing those things, and also, seeing a life beyond your disease, seeing yourself as being more than your disease. Find a purpose so that you are passionate about something and you have a reason to live.

So, here is the biggest determining factor of the quality of your life and, shall we say, your chances of healing and overcoming disease. And that is, your reason for living. If you are not committed to life, if you don’t like your life, if you are in awful relationships, struggling with money, and you kind of feel “Oh, I’m ready to check out, and now I have to deal with this illness,” what’s going to happen is that you’re going to have this fear of it reoccurring. You’re going to be in this really shrunken energy stage, the opposite of expanded. And what’s going to happen is that chances are it may reoccur. But if you use this illness as a springboard, it’s like “Oh my gosh. I want to find my purpose. I want to live long. I want to be committed to being here.” And it’s about getting passionate about life and living, and shifting your focus from disease or dying to living. Really shift your focus and say, “If I have a clean bill of health from this moment on,” even tell yourself, “If I was guaranteed that this illness is not going to come back, what would I do with the rest of my life?” Now go and do that, whatever it is. If you were guaranteed this moment this illness is not going to come back, what would you do? And start creating your vision and your passion from this kind of thinking, this mindset that it’s not going to occur. And start living your life that way so that you have a reason to live. That, in itself, expands your energy state, which increases whatever you need in your physical body, the right endorphins and the right things in your body to start the healing process. Sorry that was longwinded again.

JJ: No. And again, I’d keep you here all day. Some of these, I’m going to have to write some of the answers out to or direct them. Can you do one short quick one before we have to close?

Anita: Yes, of course.

JJ: Okay. “My nephew took his life on December 27th due to PTSD issues. Does he think he will be welcomed? Were loved ones there to greet him? How should those of us still here heal from this? My pain is great.”

Anita: First of all, I’m sorry for all of you here that have to go through with this. You need to heal your own pain, but your nephew is totally fine. Contrary to popular belief, people who take their own life, they are not punished or judged on the other side. They’ve gone through so much pain here. The last thing that’s going to happen is for them to have more pain on the other side. Your nephew will be completely welcomed. He’s safe. And I am certain, from that state of mind, he is feeling amazing. He’s absolutely feeling amazing. He’s free. He’s free from all the pain. And the only thing he wants for the people who are living, and this is for anybody who has taken their life, the only thing they want for their loved ones who are living is for them to heal and find joy again. And they do not want you to feel guilty for what happened to them. They do not want you to feel that it’s your fault. They are actually feeling free and released from what took their life.

Having said that, I do not want to encourage. I’m not trying to encourage people to take their life. The most ideal thing to do is to climb out of it and find a reason to live. So you need to seek help if you’re thinking of taking your life. So please don’t take your life because things can change for you on a dime, like they did for me. But if you have lost someone, please know they are not suffering on the other side. They absolutely are not. And they don’t want you to suffer on this side either. So do whatever you need to do to heal your pain, and know that you don’t have to feel guilty because you did not have anything to do with them crossing over. It was their state of mind that did it.

JJ: Thank you for that. And I have to close out of respect for time for you and time for me. But know that I’d love to have you come back and talk about your other books that you have that we didn’t even skim the surface on. I would love to have you. So, Anita does Facebook Lives, and she puts them on YouTube, and so you’re able to ask her directly some of these questions, and I know you answer them. Where’s the best place for them to go to connect more with you?

Anita: As you mentioned, I have a YouTube channel, Facebook page where I do the live videos. I have a newsletter. If they go to my website at anitamoorjani.com, they will find everything there, how to connect with me. We also have an online platform, which they can join our own private online platform, a membership platform. And also, of course, there’s my books, which is “Dying to be Me” and “What If This Is Heaven?” So, many ways to connect with me. And I’m on Instagram and Twitter as well.

JJ: So please follow Anita. Again, my recommendation, strong plea, is to at least listen to or read “Dying to be Me” ASAP and watch her YouTube TED Talk. And then go to anitamoorjani.com and see what calls to you, and follow the impulse you have to connect with her more. And hopefully, Anita, we’ll have you back on. I appreciate so much you taking the time now after writing your next book that’s coming out, to be on the show today to give some people hope and inspiration, clarity and direction and guidance. So, thank you so much.

Anita: Thank you. I would love to be back. Thank you so much.