Anita Moorjani 


Sensitive is the New Strong
a book excerpt

February 2, 2006, was supposed to have been the last day of my life. That was the day doctors told my family that I was in the final stages of Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a form of lymphatic cancer. The cancer ravaging my body had metastasized and spread from the base of my skull to my breasts, under my arms, and all the way to my abdomen. My lungs were filled with fluid and I was no longer absorbing nutrition. I was in a coma as my organs began shutting down. Death was upon me.

But suddenly, while in the process of dying — completely aware of the urgency of the medical team, the frenzied emotions of my family, the doctor's words "Her heart may be beating but it's too late to save her" — I experienced something so infinite and altogether fantastic that I titled an entire chapter in Dying to Be Me with those very words: "Something Infinite and Altogether Fantastic." There's no other way to describe it. In short, even though my physical body had died, I, my soul, my essence, my Being, wasn't dead!! I felt amazing — light, and free. The pain and fear were gone. The fear from the illness that had been ravaging my body and the fear of death — all gone.

I was aware of the vastness, complexity, and depth of everything around me, while being simultaneously aware that I was part of something alive, infinite, and altogether fantastic—a large and unfolding tapestry beyond sight and sound. It was a place of total clarity, where everything made sense. I could intrinsically see and feel how we're all connected and part of the same consciousness. I could also understand how every thought and every decision I had made in my life up to that point had led me to that moment lying on that hospital bed, dying of cancer.

Eventually, I reached a point in this transcendent state where I had to make a choice: do I come back to this physical body or do I continue on to this other realm? At first, not one single fiber in my being wanted to come back. Why would I want to leave this amazing space? Suddenly, however, I sensed the presence of my dad, who had died ten years prior. He was there to help me through this transition. "It's not your time," he said. "You have some gifts waiting for you, so you need to go back to your physical body."
"But why would I want to go back to a sick and dying body?" I protested.

We didn't communicate verbally, of course, because we have no biology in the other realm. Still, there was no boundary between my father's pure essence and mine, despite us not having been particularly close when I was growing up in the physical realm. I just knew what he wanted me to know. Even the term "telepathic communication" isn't strong enough to describe that communication. My dad wanted me to know that now that I'd experienced the truth of who I really was and had clarity about what caused the cancer, the cancer would heal if I chose to go back to my body. The moment I made the decision to return to this physical plane was the same moment my dad said to me, "Go back and live your life fearlessly."

I returned to my physical body, opened my eyes, and came out of the coma. Within five weeks the doctors could find no trace of cancer in my body. Except to acknowledge it was nothing short of a miracle, they couldn't explain what had happened.

...Before I dive into the world and traits of empaths, let me first say that you don't have to die, as I did, to awaken these abilities. You can awaken to these gifts at any time in your life. Some of us have always known but didn't have a name for it. Some of us have been empaths our whole life and didn't know it. Others might not be full-on empaths but have many traits that fall into the spectrum of sensitivities that make us very different from other people.

Very different from other people. It's hard for me to even write these words since one of the profound takeaways from my NDE was that on a transcendent level, we are all made of the same substance. When we shed our physical bodies, we are all pure essence, pure love, pure divinity, and pure spirituality. We are all interconnected. Yet in our physical bodies, it's by embracing our difference that we truly feel that connection with us all the time.

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