This is part 2 of our exclusive interview with Anita Moorjani. In case you have missed part 1 of the interview, please find it here.
When Wayne Dyer first heard about Anita’s near-death experience, he felt irresistibly called to do all that he could to get her compelling message out to the world. Dyer has also written the foreword in Anita’s book ‘Dying to Be Me’. Here at Super Souls we feel the same and we have experienced our time with Anita as extremely inspiring, refreshing and uplifting.
Soul Love: Sometimes it seems that cancer rules our modern world. We have ‘runs for cancer’, foundations like Livestrong and so on. Although the initiatives are very positive, you personally believe this is fear based awareness creation. Besides of spreading your loving message, do you think that you could also contribute in other ways to ‘love based’ cancer awareness and prevention?
Anita Moorjani: I wouldn’t call it cancer awareness, I wouldn’t even touch on cancer awareness. If it was up to me I would say more ‘health awareness’ and we need to define what health actually is. We should think about this. Think of all the money that we spend on:
a) cancer awareness
b) cancer research
c) cancer diagnostic tools
d) chemo therapy
and all the money that is spent not only in the medical industry, but in the area of early detection, etc. Everyone is well aware of the impact of cancer.
Now if you ask any person what does a healthy person really look and feel like, hardly anybody knows. You know, you go to a doctor, they do blood tests, they check your heart rate, they check all the values and they know that you don’t have diabetes or your heart is fine and they say: “Okay, you are healthy and you can go home.” The doctor will not ask you: “How are you feeling? How are your emotions? Have you gone through a divorce or are you in a bad relationship? How are things at your work?” The doctor doesn’t care about all that. That’s not the doctor’s fault, but because of the system, they don’t have the time, budget etc. It’s not the doctor’s fault at all.
My point is, health is very different to what we think it is. When a disease shows up in your body it has already been in your energy, in your emotions for a long, long time before you start noticing it physically in your body. Your emotions have been carrying that for a long time before it manifests in cancer for example. So a healthy person is healthy mentally, healthy emotionally and physically. Not just having the right numbers on a machine. If we spend as much money, time, research and awareness in teaching people developing tools for health awareness we would have a lot more healthy people than we have today. You might have noticed that the numbers haven’t gone down, no matter how much breast cancer awareness or cancer awareness we have. The number of people with cancer is still rising. We are all just being focused on how to fight cancer. Nobody is thinking in terms of “how do we create health?”
Imagine if everybody changed their focus to one of health, what the impact could be.
I like to try an experiment with you. I want you to look around the room that you are in and find anything that is the colour green. It could be anything, drapery, wall pattern etc. and I want you to count them in your mind. Do you see anything green? [yes, I do].
Now, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to recall how many things you can think of that were of the colour red? [I have to laugh out loud now, as I feel being tricked]. Okay, open your eyes and look around. Did you miss a lot? [yes, of course I did].
So when you focus on something, that is all you will see. And by changing your focus that’s what you will see. Right now our whole planet is being focused on cancer and not on health. When we focus on fighting cancer we are not focused on increasing health or promoting health.
SL: You also describe in your book the following: “So I found myself with nothing but compassion for all the criminals and terrorists in the world, as well as their victims. I understood in a way I never had before that for people to commit such acts they must be really full of confusion, frustration, pain and hatred.” Where lies the solution Anita?
AM: Right now we still have a lot of criminals in our world because we have created a system that is based on fear. From the time that we’re very young we are taught through competitiveness. We don’t learn to collaborate. We learn from a very young age that you have to get to the top. Nobody wants to be that last one to be picked for their baseball team or basketball team. Everybody knows that in order to get to a good school you have to score higher than everybody else in your class. And so kids learn from a very young age that everybody else is ‘the enemy’ because “I have got to get ahead of them all”. So we don’t really learn to collaborate.
Because of this, for some people it can go wrong somewhere and it can become extreme and become pathological because we have created a world where people compete and see everybody else as the enemy. We compare externally with the outside world and say “They have this so I have to have more”. Until the system changes our situation is not going to change. We are going to have people who will go off the rail at times and become murderers, criminals, it’s just one of the fallouts of this society that we together have created.
That’s why I am saying there’s no ‘them and us’, it’s all ‘us’, we have made it possible for this to exist in our society. Until we change this at its roots, which will take a long time, we do need to have prisons because it protects the innocent people. There’s no way around it at the moment. But even with people in prisons I think it’s time for those in power to start to really see why are we building more and more prisons? Why is it that the society is becoming this way? Why is the number of prisoners increasing? Maybe they should start with the prisoners and they need to reverse the whole thing as it is not about hating them, it’s about teaching them love. There’s something lacking in them and it is really about teaching them ‘what is love’ and that ‘there is a better way’. There is a better way of expressing yourself. And everybody does the best that they know how in that moment, this is all that they have. Even the worst criminals, that’s all that they have in that moment in which they are expressing themselves.
This is of course not always easy to accept, because when somebody in your own family gets raped or murdered it would be very, very hard. You would want that rapist or murderer to go behind bars because you don’t want this to happen to somebody else. But my question is: Why have we created such a society that there are rapists and murderers who are doing this? Why are our jails bursting at the seems? There’s something we are doing wrong. And this all starts at the time that we are really young. I see violence as a form of cancer in a person.
“Criminals don’t do things because they hate you, but they do it because they are suffering.”
SL: On the other hand, what are according to you the most positive developments in the world right now?
AM: What has been amazing for me is that I was prepared to get a lot more negative reactions from my story, because I know that for a lot of the people some of the things I say are very controversial. Especially about religion or about the criminals and although they are controversial I say them from a place of my own heart, from a place of universal love and not from a place of trying to be controversial.
My issue with religion is the fact that it divides us and it causes hate with each other. My point is that we need to realize that when we can see each other’s essence we will notice that we’re not divided by religion or anything, we are of the same essence. Even with the criminals, when you can see their essence, you will see that they didn’t do things because they hate you, but they did it because they are suffering. So I am aware that what I am saying goes against a lot of people’s beliefs and yet the criticism I have had is so minimal and that is a pleasant surprise to me. It gives me a lot of hope that people are ready to change as people are not happy with the way things currently are and they find my message to be very refreshing because they are already disappointed with the way the world is going and what religions are teaching them, so they are ready for something new.
SL: Our sister Debbie Ford who very recently passed on, said in an interview with Oprah: “It is courageous to choose life, when facing a disease”. How would you react if somebody was telling you this?
AM: I feel that life is a gift and we are definitely courageous for being here and I think that is a good point that she made because I feel that we don’t give ourselves enough gratitude for being here and we judge ourselves by the wrong standard. Many of us think that “Oh I need to be like a monk meditating on a mountain top in order to consider myself spiritual. Oh I’ll never be there, I do my best” and we think that the monk who meditates in the monastery for twenty years has to be worshipped, that we are nothing compared to him. I don’t see that as the case. My point is that to fully engage in life, you know, to be out there, even being out there in the workforce needing to make money to pay the bills and pay the rent, even that is very brave. Or being out there sharing whatever you are and who you are is as brave if not more brave than sitting inside a monastery.
SS: Of course you also made a brave choice to come back to this life.
AM: Yes, that’s true, I wanted to come back and I wanted to be fully engaged in life.
SL: We can actually conclude everything with the inspiring words that you wrote in your book ‘Dying to Be Me’:
“It’s unfortunate that we keep searching outside of ourselves for answers, in religion, medicine, scientific study, books and other people. We think the truth is somewhere out there, still elusive.
Yet by doing this we’re only getting more and more lost, appearing to move away from who we truly are. The entire universe is within us.” Is it really that simple Anita?
AM: It is, it really is, because when you follow your own heart and you allow yourself to be who you are, then the right teachers, the right book and the right information shows up for you. And when you go out there searching, when you are actually pursuing, actively searching, chasing, you will find that there is much information out there so that you just get more confused. Information conflicts each other and the message that you are sending yourself is that “I don’t have the capacity to know the answer myself”. You are sending yourself that message and the more you chase, the more you need to pursue, the more you are sending your own self the message that “I don’t know the answer and that’s why I constantly have to chase for it”. There are also lots of teachers, so which one do you go to?
Only when you go inward and you have this trust that “I have the capacity, I have all the resources I need to navigate this life, I trust”. When you surrender, when you trust and you have that confidence, then the right teacher will show up, the right information will show up. And in the right way.
And don’t forget that you don’t have to wait until you die to experience heaven or nirvana. Our true magnificence exists right here, right now.
SL: Anita, we feel truly blessed to have you in our lives and we thank you for sharing your inspiring and loving message with us.
For more information about Anita Moorjani, please visit AnitaMoorjani.com or Anita’s profile page. To purchase her book ‘Dying to be Me’ follow this link.
INTERVIEW BY: DIRK TERPSTRA – SOUL LOVE FOUNDER
Enjoy this post? Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one.
