Doctors Called It Divine Intervention! Anita Moorjani’s Near-Death Experience, Unexplainable Cancer Recovery & Her Message of Hope

Cancer Put Her in a Coma. She Survived. Her Near Death Experience Changed Everything. Mayim Bialik's Breakdown delves into Anita Moorjani’s (renowned author, TedX speaker & self-help spiritual speaker) mind-blowing near-death experience (NDE) story and how it completely transformed her cancer, her path to healing & spiritual awakening, and how it changed the way she viewed life after death. Before her miraculous cancer recovery, Anita opens up like never before about the emotional toll of escaping an arranged marriage, her belief that neglecting her own needs while caring for others may have contributed to her cancer, and why living out of alignment with your true self can be toxic (and even deadly). Her integration journey post-NDE wasn’t easy. Friends and family treated her like the same person — but she had touched something far greater than this world, and she couldn’t go back. Anita Moorjani also breaks down: - Her belief that heaven is not a place, but a state of being - How we’re all eternally connected — past, present, and future - Why intuition, self-love, & authenticity are the real medicine we've all been missing - How you’re likely manifesting wrong - How Ayurveda and naturopathic healing deeply resonated with her healing journey - Difference between unconditional love (the kind people experience during NDEs) and earthly love - Why deepening your intuition starts with radical self-confidence - How letting go of what isn’t authentically you is the key to ultimate healing This is not just a story about cancer — it's a wake-up call about life, death, spiritual awakening and the power of living as your truest self. Tune in to MBB now if you’ve ever felt stuck, afraid, disconnected, or if you’ve ever wondered what really happens after we die. The Anita Moorjani Sanctuary: https://www.amsanctuary.com/ The 10th Anniversary Edition of Anita Moorjani’s memoir, Dying to Be Me: https://a.co/d/aRJDs7Q Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  The doctor was telling my husband that these are her final hours. She won't even make it through the night.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I started to notice that I wasn't feeling any more pain. The fear was gone. I'm not in my body anymore.

• 0:33Mayim Bialik?

  How do you get from a terminal-stage diagnosis of cancer to having an undetectable level of cancer a month later? An encounter that is out of this world?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  I can only put it down to divine intervention.

• 0:47Mayim Bialik?

  You were clinically in a coma.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I was seeing where other people had hurt me or where I had allowed myself to be hurt. That's what led me to this point. That's how I squashed my little spirit and soul. For the first time, I felt like I was enveloped in this feeling of unconditional love. I was loved just because I exist. I was shown scenes of my future. That's when I was told, now that you know the truth of who you really are, your body will heal very quickly. The tumors started shrinking before our eyes, and the doctors didn't even know what to make of it. You don't need an excuse to live the life that you were meant to live.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Even having cancer didn't heal me from being a people pleaser. It was death that healed me from that.

• 1:47Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 1:48Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:49Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to the last episode we ever will release of The Breakdown, because this one broke the mold. We don't need to do any other episodes ever again.

• 1:57Jonathan Cohen?

  News to me, I was ready to keep going.

• 2:00Mayim Bialik?

  If you're not gonna believe something, it would be this episode, and yet...

• 2:05Jonathan Cohen?

  There's more proof for this episode than any other.

• 2:07Mayim Bialik?

  There's literally more scientific proof for an inexplicable, non-physical healing.

• 2:16Mayim Bialik?

  than we've ever heard of before. And what's amazing is the person we're going to speak to has never heard of anyone with her story.

• 2:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Our guest today went from a stage 4B cancer diagnosis.

• 2:30Mayim Bialik?

  Her family was told she had hours to live. She ended up falling into a coma as a result of complete organ failure. And she had an experience that led to, a month later, being discharged from the hospital with no evidence of cancer in her body. How do you get from a terminal stage diagnosis of cancer to having an undetectable level of cancer a month later? An encounter that is out of this world? And indeed, her consciousness left her body. And for almost two days, she was floating in another realm, where it was not only communicated to her how she got cancer,

• 3:15Mayim Bialik?

  but how she would be able to heal from cancer. And that happened within a month of her opening her eyes and saying, "I'm back."

• 3:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Just before we tell you who this guest is, if you haven't already subscribed to the channel, please do so. It helps us make the best possible show. An unbelievable statistic is, less than 40% of people who listen to the channel regularly are subscribed. So please, go ahead, anywhere you're listening or watching, click the little bell notification on YouTube, if you're on YouTube, and help us make this the best possible show.

• 3:49Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to be speaking today to Anita Moorjani. She is a renowned author and spiritual speaker. Her New York Times bestseller, "Dying to Be Me: My Journey From Cancer to Near Death to True Healing." She was living in Hong Kong, she was raised in Hong Kong. She was battling end-stage cancer.

• 4:08Mayim Bialik?

  And she experienced a remarkable and I would say extremely, extremely unique near-death experience. She ended up writing about it for Dr. Jeffrey Long's website, N D E R F, the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, and was essentially discovered. Not only was she told in her near-death experience why she got cancer and how to heal, she was also shown a life that had nothing to do with the life that she was living. She had no idea how any of what she was shown would possibly come true, and it has. Anita Moorjani is an inspirational speaker and by her own admission, has had an experience

• 4:52Mayim Bialik?

  that no one seems to be able to clinically explain. It can only have happened from a non-physical transformation. We're going to hear all about what her life was like, what the things were that led up to her getting cancer, what it was like to treat her cancer, what it was like to be told she would die, what it was like to come back from death and heal and spend her life sharing her story. Anita Moorjani, such a pleasure to have you in person at The Breakdown. Break it down. You have one of the most incredible transformational stories. Tell us what your body was experiencing at the point that you had stage 4B cancer.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  So at that point, the doctors told my family that it was terminal and my body was, my muscles were atrophying because my body was no longer absorbing nutrition. So I weighed about 85 pounds. My muscles were completely atrophied, so I could no longer walk. I looked like a skeleton, but I did not have the strength to stand on my own legs. And even when I was sitting, like I would be on a wheelchair, even when I was sitting, I didn't even have the strength in my neck to hold my head up. My head would

• 6:14Speaker 01

  be hanging down and my lungs were filled with fluid. I had open skin lesions that were weeping toxins. But the cancer, because it was lymphoma, it was lymphatic cancer.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  It caused tumors throughout my lymphatic system at the, at all the lymph node points. And these tumors, many of them were the size of golf balls. So you could see them, these golf ball sized tumors from the base of my skull, around my neck, under my arms, in my chest, all the way down to my abdomen. And because my lungs were filled with fluid, when I would lay flat, I would choke on my own fluid. I was going to the clinic every two or three weeks to have the fluid drained. I was also connected to an oxygen tank with the tube going in my nose and I had a portable tank.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  So basically, I was in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank or lying in bed, but propped up, otherwise I would choke. But then on February the second, two thousand and six, I didn't wake up. I, yeah, I basically went into a coma.

• 7:33Jonathan Cohen?

  How many tumors are we talking about? Like when people think about the lymphatic system, they don't really know all the places that, like, I don't know, how many lymphatics parts are there?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a, I mean, there's a lot of points, but I had at least six tumors.

• 7:53Jonathan Cohen?

  The size of golf balls, which is a significant size.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  It's a significant size. I had, I had one here, a smaller one here, a big-

• 8:03Jonathan Cohen?

  You're pointing to by your neck.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yes, he, here, here, one under each arm, a bigger one under this arm, actually. And then in the chest and one lodged like somewhere close to my lungs. So at least six that were significant.

• 8:23Jonathan Cohen?

  And the doctors are telling you and your family, this is the end, say goodbye. There's, there's no medical intervention that's going to help you.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Not at this point, not at this point, absolutely not.

• 8:35Mayim Bialik?

  And what happens in the body at this point that leads you to go into a coma is that basically your, your organs are not getting enough- Fluid blood flow nutrients to sustain life.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Exactly, and now the organs are shutting down. So it started with my kidneys. The doctors told my parents, my mom and my husband and my brother, that now my kidneys have shut down already and the other organs are starting to follow suit. And that there is just no nutrition in my body to heal it. There's not even enough nutrition to handle any kind of treatment. It's so far gone.

• 9:18Jonathan Cohen?

  And what was the journey up until that point? How many years had or months had you been in this increasingly debilitated state? Going through, I would imagine, all kinds of medical interventions and attempts to get you well and heal the cancer?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yes, so the journey was just under four years, about three years, 10 months for the whole journey. And in the beginning, it wasn't so bad, but it was one of those situations that I would get better and then it would come back. And then I would try different treatments, including complementary. But then it reached this point where I started to nosedive dramatically towards the end of 2005. That's when it started to nosedive dramatically. And that's when, because the doctors were starting to tell me, you probably only have three months to live.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  And I remember even hearing that impacted me greatly. And I started to feel there's no point fighting. There's no point living. And so on February the 1st, the evening of February the 1st, I was so tired. I had been in so much pain and so much discomfort, fighting just to stay alive, fighting just to breathe, because every breath was laborious. And every time if the oxygen tank was taken away or if I was getting up and trying to exert myself and just attempting to walk, I would be huffing and panting. Life was just, just living was laborious. And I was so tired.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I didn't think it was worth fighting for anymore.

• 11:05Mayim Bialik?

  Based on this description that you've just given us, there is absolutely no clinical, medical, or physiological explanation for why you're here.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:18Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, would you say that that's accurate?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  I would, and several doctors have confirmed it after the fact, yes.

• 11:25Mayim Bialik?

  One doctor has even described you being here as there has to be a non-physical explanation for why you're here.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, he did say that. He actually even said that I would put it down. He said, "I'm not religious, but I can only put it down to divine intervention." That's what he said.

• 11:46Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:30Mayim Bialik?

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• 13:15Mayim Bialik?

  It's the best way to support our show.

• 13:17Jonathan Cohen?

  What I'm fascinated about is that we're gonna get into what happened and this radical transformation that you underwent when life was too laborious, where it became too hard and you stopped breathing.

• 13:33Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm curious though to still understand your mentality because this is someone who, as you described, it's three months, about three years and 10 months of treatment, like remission, it coming back, and so like you're on a roller coaster. Before you had cancer the very first time, what was your life like? What was your mentality? What was your output? Were you a religious person? Like, who were you before this journey?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  So, I grew up in Hong Kong and my parents are Indian, ethnically Indian. I met my husband Danny in Hong Kong, who is, who also happens to be Indian. And we got married and we have, I mean, my husband and I, we have a great relationship. However, before I met him, and I hadn't been married very long before I got diagnosed. But before I met him, I would say my life was not that easy because my parents being Indian, my dad was really strict as I was growing up. And I was being groomed for an arranged marriage.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  But I went to a British school where all my classmates, all the other kids, the teachers, they were all British. So as I grew up as a teenager and into my late teens, all the other kids were thinking about which college they would go to or which university and their careers. While I was being groomed for an arranged marriage. And I was told that, or I was discouraged from even thinking about a higher education because the smarter you are as a woman, the harder it is to get you married and to find you a suitable husband. Whereas I was someone who wanted my independence. I wanted to work.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  I wanted to earn my own money because we're expected to live with our parents and have our dads take care of us and not move out until we get married and then our husbands take care of us. So when I said, "I want to work, I want to travel, I want to do these things," I was told, "Oh, that will depend on your husband after you get married." So I basically grew up in a culture With a tremendous amount of gender disparity and I wasn't valued. And a woman's worth is measured by how valuable she is to the men in her community.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  So we grow up actually learning for our own survival to be subservient to the men around us. So that was my upbringing and with a very strict dad. So my entire life was spent trying to win his approval and trying to win the approval of the men in our community and you get judged. And so I grew up being a people pleaser and I would call myself a doormat. And I wasn't religious per se, but I would say that I was, I was totally open to spirituality. The reason I wasn't religious and yet completely open to all religions and spirituality

• 16:52Speaker 01

  is because growing up in Hong Kong, having Indian parents, British school and Hong Kong being predominantly a Chinese city, I was exposed to Christianity, to Hinduism, to Taoism, to Buddhism. And so I was just exposed and immersed in all of it. So I never followed any one religion, but I did respect all of them. And I did feel there was some truth in all of them.

• 17:21Mayim Bialik?

  I also want to just sort of, you know, offer you the opportunity to sort of clarify. The notion is not that all Indian families, you know, produce people pleaser daughters. As the grandchild of immigrants from Eastern Europe, I, it's very familiar to me, this notion of sort of being groomed, as you said, you know, to be obedient, to, to caretake, to be a caregiver. And historically, for, you know, all of human history, women have kind of borne the brunt of this kind of emotional labor and physical labor in the home. I think it's important not to say that we're denigrating

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:59Mayim Bialik?

  the Indian culture in particular, but this, in families that tend to be patriarchal, that tend to be, you know, kind of centered around these kind of traditional gender roles, you, you will often see this kind of challenge, especially for women who are intelligent and independent and want to sort of break out of that.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for actually giving me that opportunity to clarify that. You're absolutely correct. Because when I go to India, I see amazing, strong women heading up companies and living independent lives. But it is, it seems to be more true for immigrants, for the offspring of immigrants. Yes, you're right about that, yeah.

• 18:43Mayim Bialik?

  One of the interesting things about your life before you found the person who's become your life partner and you describe as your soulmate, you broke off an engagement.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:55Mayim Bialik?

  Which, in my community as well, can be very, very scandalous.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:01Mayim Bialik?

  You know, once you are especially in the process of meeting with perspectives, it's seen as very untoward for a woman to decline an engagement, to make changes or alterations, or even to question the arrangement. So, can you talk a little bit about what it was in you that was already sort of brewing in terms of you being able to assert yourself? Because I think it does connect to your later story.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  When I was in my early twenties, at first, I was rebelling against the arranged marriage. I refused to have an arranged marriage. And just to put into context, I was so immersed in British culture because of the other kids at school. I was into British pop culture. I was into Cyndi Lauper. So, I didn't want an arranged marriage. But then, all my British friends went off to university and went to follow their careers. My Indian friends all had arranged marriages. Starting at age 17, I started losing all my Indian friends, one by one. By the time I was 21, I was really lonely. And so, I agreed to giving it a chance.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And that's when I started to get introduced to prospective grooms. And eventually... I did agree and say yes to someone and then we were engaged. It was only after we were engaged did the reality of what the rest of my life would be like start to hit me. So over the months, I was literally being trained on how to cook certain foods, traditional foods, in the way they needed to be cooked, and to dress a certain way, and all the finer details, I was literally being groomed. And also how to follow our Hindu religion about going to the temple

• 20:58Speaker 01

  and how many times a week. I never really went to the temple, even though I was Hindu in name. But now I was expected to go to the temple. So I was literally being groomed for this life that lay ahead of me, where I would be living with the groom and his parents, his family, basically. And as we got closer to the wedding, I got, I started to really get scared that this was it. And I started to talk to the family, my future husband's family, to say I would like to go back to school because I didn't finish school. It was an absolute no. I said I would like to work, even if it's part-time. It was an absolute no.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  So I started to get really afraid for my future. And I thought, this is it. I'm in my twenties and I have nothing to look forward to. One day, three days before the wedding, and I don't always share this part, but I went and cried on my mother's shoulders. And I told her that I'm so scared, I can't go through with it. My mom said, it's okay. You don't have to go through with it. That was such a relief. So I actually ran away, but only my mom knew where I was.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  So I ran away three days before the wedding and it really upset everybody because if you know anything about Indian weddings, they're huge affairs.

• 22:29Mayim Bialik?

  It's days and days and days.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yes, so everything was booked, all the venues were booked, the bands, the food, the videographers, the relatives had all flown in with the gifts and it was-

• 22:40Jonathan Cohen?

  How many people are we talking about from all over the world that are coming?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Hundreds.

• 22:44Mayim Bialik?

  Hundreds.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Hundreds of people.

• 22:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Wow.

• 22:47Mayim Bialik?

  And there's a different outfit that you wear sometimes, several different outfits a day, like it's-

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:52Mayim Bialik?

  It's a very large-

• 22:53Speaker 01

  And all these other people have brought all their outfits, all their fancy Indian-

• 22:57Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know why the first thing I think of is like, you come to a wedding and it's like, I brought 17 outfits and she didn't even show up.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  I know, exactly, so-

• 23:04Jonathan Cohen?

  So three days, everyone is there already or like, or they're still in progress of-

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Everyone, most of the people are there, they're already there, they've brought wedding gifts and, I mean, everything is booked, the bands, the food, the hotel rooms, the venues, the everything, the honeymoon, it's all booked and done.

• 23:24Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm just fascinated about like, the moment you decide to run away and like, is it at night, are you like evading people so that they can't like spot you walking out the door?

• 23:35Mayim Bialik?

  It's like Shakespearean, you know?

• 23:36Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, how do you escape, like, what is that moment where, where are you when you decide to run away and then like literally the physical act of like escaping, how does that work?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  So I phoned up a friend who is not a relative, but very close friend, because we knew that nobody would think of finding me there at her house, they would think I was at home or with a relative, and she came with her partner, her boyfriend, and they picked me up and they whisked me away to her home, which was a little further away, quite a few miles away from where all the activity was being, was taking place, where all the families were.

• 24:17Jonathan Cohen?

  Did you have to go at night, was it like a black car, like, did you have to have like a robe over you to like get, I'm imagining it like a prison break movie where you are like in the linen, the linens?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  No, fortunately, no, fortunately it wasn't that dramatic because at that time nobody suspected anything, so it just looked like maybe I was going out or something, but- But I wasn't planning to come back.

• 24:43Jonathan Cohen?

  You didn't have like a suitcase with you, you kind of left without?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  We did put a bunch of things in the trunk of her car, yes.

• 24:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Wow.

• 24:51Mayim Bialik?

  Did you tell the fiance?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  So, prior to me even running away, I called him because I wanted to talk to him. And this is the part that I, I've never shared this publicly, but I guess there's a time when one has to do this. I called him because I felt we needed to talk. He had a temper and I was afraid of him and he was reminding me too much of my dad.

• 25:18Mayim Bialik?

  Oh my.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And I was scared to go through this with him. And I wanted to talk to him about it before actually turning up at the temple for the wedding. I was told I could not see him. I had to just show up at the temple.

• 25:34Mayim Bialik?

  How many times had you met before you were even engaged?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Uh, we had met very few times, not that many, and we weren't allowed to meet much. We kept being told.

• 25:44Mayim Bialik?

  You were never alone with him, correct?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Um, maybe hardly ever, maybe once, twice at the most. But we were told, don't worry, everything will sort itself out after you're married. So, when I said, I need to talk to him, because when I talked to him on the phone, he seems irritable, bad-tempered, and I'm about to marry this man. I need to see him face to face. I want to look into his eyes and feel that he does care for me and that I'm gonna be happy. And I was told that you can do all that after you're married, just show up at the temple. So, I tried calling him. He wouldn't talk to me on the phone. He was very abrupt.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  And then I said to my mom, when I cried and cried, and I said, if I can't see him, I'm not gonna show up at the temple. And that was three days away. And my mom said, I'm, I'm with you, I agree with you. She didn't know half of what was happening on the conversations. She said, her reaction was, why didn't you tell me earlier?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  So then she, so she helped me get out. And she said, I will handle it. I will tell his family because he was not talking to me properly.

• 27:05Mayim Bialik?

  When I started, you know, reading your story, I realized like your mom is in many ways kind of like a co-heroine of this story because, you know, I think about my own parents. My father tried to back out of the wedding days before. And his mother said to him, take a nap, you'll feel better. And he took a nap and then he felt better. But apparently when he called my mother to say, I don't think I can go through with it. She said, fine, fuck you and hung up on him. She was 18 at the time. When I think about both of my grandmothers and the culture that I come from, it's very rare to find a woman who, who will say to a daughter in that situation, I've got you. You know what I mean?

• 27:50Mayim Bialik?

  Like, there's not many options, even for women of your mother's generation, to have the wherewithal to say, you don't have to go through with this arranged marriage. I'm going to protect you. It's enormous.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  It is enormous. I was so grateful for her and I wouldn't have been able to do it. So had my mother not sided with me, I would have gone through with it.

• 28:13Mayim Bialik?

  And also, you know, all of this is sort of part of your journey, your path, which is revealed to you years later, you know, in a very specific way. Once you break that engagement, you ended up sort of rebuilding a life. You end up meeting this man who, who you fell in love with. It was a love match, as we call it. And you started building a life together. But there's a few people in your life who you experience some tragedy with.

• 28:47Mayim Bialik?

  That also is part of your story. Can you talk a little bit about what you encountered adjacent to a few specific health-related traumas?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  So my best friend, who I grew up with, we were the same age. She was diagnosed with cancer, what seemed like out of the blue. And she had been healthy and vibrant. And then she just found herself huffing and puffing, going up and down stairs. And so she went for a checkup and they found a tumor lodged between her lungs. And it turned out to be quite serious. It needed surgery immediately. And then it was, it was actually diagnosed as an aggressive cancer. And that came as a shock to me, almost as big a shock as if I received the diagnosis.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Because we were so close and she was like a sister to me. And she had two small children. I didn't have children. So she had little children and I couldn't believe that she was going through this. And what ended up happening is that just because, probably the way I was brought up, I ended up almost neglecting my life just to help her. And, you know, and I was doing things for her kids. I was basically feeling guilty if I went out and had fun while she was in the hospital getting her treatments. I could not go out with my friends.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  I couldn't go shopping because going out with my friends, it made me feel like she was missing because she was part of the group of friends. And it just didn't feel right to go without her. So I literally gave up my own life during that time that she was sick and started to neglect my own home. And then my husband's brother-in-law, same age, also was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. So I was watching this happen around me. And I was, as I was watching, I became so fearful of cancer. And then I started researching cancer prevention.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And so I became obsessed, because these two people, my age, healthy. I became obsessed with trying to avoid getting cancer. I started to order everything I could online to, you know, antioxidants and supplements to prevent getting cancer. I started to follow an anti-cancer diet. And I'm someone who loves chocolate. I have a sweet tooth. I gave up eating sugar and I gave up eating a lot of my favorite foods just because I was on this anti-cancer diet.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  And my life just felt so small and limited and fearful because here I was on an anti-cancer diet at the same time watching two people I love deteriorate.

• 32:03Mayim Bialik?

  It's impossible to not think of our conversation we had with Gabor Maté. In his book, The Myth of Normal, he talks about one of the hardest things for people to hear, which is that what physicians have noted for hundreds and hundreds of years is that by and large, meaning not in every case, but by and large, there are certain personality features that tend to group with certain diagnoses. And, you know, when, when we talked about this with Gabor Maté, I said to Jonathan, I don't even know if I want to talk about this because it's so painful,

• 32:43Mayim Bialik?

  especially for any of us who have been ill, have lost someone to cancer in particular. For, for people listening who might be struggling with cancer themselves. But what Gabor Maté talked about is something that people who tend to... Live for other people and be caregivers and suppress their needs in place of others' needs. And people who tend to be on this kind of fearful and anxious spectrum, oftentimes you will see a cancer diagnosis.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:20Mayim Bialik?

  And it's just so, I can't even, it's like I can't even articulate it because there are many people with those features who don't get cancer. That's absolutely true.

• 33:28Jonathan Cohen?

  And to caveat, there's a lot of environmental issues and toxins that people get exposed to that are outside of that realm. So if we're isolating the variables and we're just thinking about people who have no other reason or exposure or issue, then there's this overwhelming similarity.

• 33:46Mayim Bialik?

  But also, how do you, how do you frame that? Because no one wants to believe that they gave themselves cancer. No one wants to walk around saying, "I did this to myself." What was your framework?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  So, of course, at the time, I never would have thought I gave this to myself. But let me tell you something that speaks volumes. So while I was caregiving for my friend and I wasn't even able to live my own life, one day I felt a lump here. And I went to the doctor and the first thing the doctor said was, "Oh, it's your lymph glands, it's a cyst." Actually, it said, "It's your lymph glands. You must be fighting an infection. Let's put you on antibiotics for a bit and see if it goes down." It didn't go down. And at that time, it was very common to prescribe antibiotics for anything.

• 34:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Everything.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  So, yeah, everything, yes. Today, I'm reluctant to do that, but it didn't disappear because they said, "Give it three weeks." It didn't disappear. So that's when they said, "Oh, we'll have to do a biopsy. It looks like a cyst. We'll do a biopsy." They did a biopsy and the biopsy came back showing that it, and then they did the scan and saw it had spread down to here, my upper-left quadrant. So first, the biopsy confirmed that it was lymphoma. The scan confirmed that it had spread to the upper-left quadrant. So they said, "You have stage 2 Hodgkin's lymphoma."

• 35:20Speaker 01

  It should have freaked me out because I was so scared of the cancer. But here's a secondary emotion that I actually noticed. I felt, oh, now I get to take care of my own life.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  And see, I'm getting goosebumps even when I remember that moment. And now I was able to tell people, sorry, I can't do this because I have to go for my treatment. I have to go do this for myself. I have to rest. I have to do this.

• 35:53Mayim Bialik?

  There's an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David's mother dies. And, you know, obviously, this is a comedic turn, but he was so excited that he now had a reason to say no to people. That when people would ask him to do things, because you know, this character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he famously doesn't like doing things. And he was like, oh, I can't go to that benefit. My mom died. And it's funny because you're laughing because it's so absurd, but you talk about this. That if there is any element of relief when you are diagnosed with something, that I can finally take care of myself. I can finally say no. I can finally rest.

• 36:34Mayim Bialik?

  That's an indication that you're not essentially living the life that you're supposed to be living.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yep, that is a huge indication. You don't need an excuse to live the life that you were meant to live. You don't need, don't wait for the excuse. That's why I share my story.

• 36:53Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  And interestingly, you mentioned Gabor Maté, because when my book, Dying to be Me, came out eventually.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  He actually heard of it and read it and reached out to me. And he said that he wrote a book called When the Body Says No. And he said, you're exactly the kind of person that I'm talking about.

• 37:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I'm curious now, we started the cancer journey where you get diagnosed. And how does that go for you in terms of your emotional world, your psychological world? What changes during those initial phases of cancer? And sort of what is the trajectory, obviously, to get you three years and 10 months later?

• 37:37Speaker 01

  In the beginning, I didn't really look sick. So I was still able to still continue with a lot of the activities. Later, when I went in the coma, I got a lot of clarity. Everything that I was doing, I was still doing from a place of a fear of cancer. So even every treatment, every food I was eating, every supplement, I was on a boatload of supplements. And I was on a very strict diet because everything, I was still researching how to get rid of cancer. And I wasn't doing things because, oh, now I really do want to take care of myself. I do love myself. I had a reason now to say no to people.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  But everything I was doing came from the fear of the cancer and the fear of death. Every activity, everything I ate, everything I put in my mouth.

• 38:33Mayim Bialik?

  And obviously, when you're fighting for your life, right?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:37Mayim Bialik?

  You know, it's hard to sort of step back and say, I love myself. I'm nourishing my body, like this medicine is. It's very hard to do that because the human experience is one of fear of suffering, fear of pain, fear of death. And especially at the time when you were dealing with this, we still, cancer was still this kind of large. It is a large looming fear. There's so much uncertain about it.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. And so I had this fear around me. And what made it worse was that I was watching these two people, my best friend and my husband's brother in law, getting, their health was deteriorating. So there I was determined not to let that happen to me. Neither of them were integrating complementary medicine. So I was the one that was throwing myself into that.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  I was doing Ayurveda, I was doing yoga. So they were deteriorating. And then when my best friend died, I was devastated. Even then, even though I was. Taking care of myself. Um, when people were offering to help me, when people were seeing that I was deteriorating, I was, I, I would not let them help me. I would keep saying, no, I'm fine. I'm okay. People would offer to drive me or uh, cook food for us because my husband, uh, as I deteriorated and as I got worse and worse, my husband stopped going to work full time and he was helping to

• 40:11Speaker 01

  care for me. Other people would step in and I was still always saying, no, I don't want to trouble them. I don't want to bother them. Um, and so I was still pushing them away because I didn't want to be a bother to anyone. One of the things that I realized later in hindsight, that even having cancer didn't heal me from being a people pleaser. It was death that healed me from that.

• 40:39Mayim Bialik?

  You did embark on a journey. Um, you went, I don't want to call it home because your home was obviously Hong Kong, but you went to India and you, for a period of time, immersed yourself in Ayurvedic principles and diet and kind of the customs of that cultural healing modality, which is very, very powerful. Something interesting happened in that you started to feel better.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:08Mayim Bialik?

  And when you were immersed in that community and that culture of Ayurveda, that you felt that something was resonating. And when you went back to Hong Kong, which is a much more diverse in terms of, of cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, spiritual practices, you felt that there was something that happened when you got back to Hong Kong that was not as supportive as what you were doing when you were in India. Can you describe a little bit about what you talk about in terms of the, the confusion that your body experienced?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  I did Ayurveda, Ayurvedic medicine, where I was following a complete Ayurvedic diet and I was doing the yoga postures and I was following a yoga master. And at that time, I was being told that don't even think of the word cancer. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Pretend it doesn't exist because. It, you know, because the yoga masters were saying in actuality, it doesn't exist. Every disease is just an imbalance in your body. So what we're going to do is we're going to fix the imbalance. And I loved that way of thinking. It really resonated with me.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  So I immersed myself in that and I felt incredible. I did feel all the the lymph nodes start to soften and go down and I was feeling so much better. I was doing yoga. I was eating differently because they gave me, you see, when I was doing it myself in Hong Kong, I was so scared of everything I was eating. Here, now, the fear was actually gone. Now I was really eating nutritious food where I could now eat dairy. I had stopped eating dairy. I was able to eat sugar again because in Ayurvedic diet, you're supposed to eat sweet, sour, salty. You're supposed to have the full range of flavors.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  So I was eating so much better. I was gaining some weight and so I wasn't as emaciated. And I was looking better, feeling better and emotionally and mentally much better. And I was looking forward to a future. And it showed in my body, in my health, in, in my energy. So then, when I was in that space for about six months, I thought, okay, I'm good now. I'm gonna take this, what I've learned, back with me to Hong Kong because I'm missing my home, I'm missing my dog. Danny had come out to see me twice while I was there. So I went back home. And of course, all my friends wanted to know how I was doing. And I love my friends.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  But I was back in that community. My best friend hadn't passed away yet, but she had missed me tremendously. And my brother-in-law. And so I was back in that community of Cancer and hospitals and watching two people die. And they started to ask me, where are you at with your treatment?

• 44:12Mayim Bialik?

  They used the word cancer.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  They used the word cancer. It all came back and are you going for your checkups? And I said, no, I've been going for this Ayurveda. I'm going to go back there for the follow ups. And they said, oh, gosh, that's not, that's pseudoscience. That's woo woo. You don't want to do that. You don't, you need to go to a real doctor. And here I am watching what's happening around me. All the fear came back and, and I felt myself getting worse again, getting back into that. It's like, almost like, felt like my environment was shaping me.

• 44:47Mayim Bialik?

  You also talk about how there was something about the consistency that you found when you were in India that was not present when you got back to Hong Kong. And it's something that I think a lot of our listeners can relate to, especially anyone who's had an autoimmune diagnosis or a diagnosis that kind of jumps around, where you keep trying to find the thing. You keep trying to find the treatment, the supplement, the guru, the medication, the meditation. And there's something about the confusion that comes

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:18Mayim Bialik?

  from jumping from place to place that when you removed yourself from that, you found some more clarity.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So when I was in India, there was no conflict. I was immersed in Ayurveda. I was immersed in one culture, one way of eating that was helping me, that this culture knew was healing and nourishing. And my mind was satisfied, my soul, my spirit. But when I was in Hong Kong, because I was exposed to eastern and western, western naturopathic, western medicine, eastern naturopathic, where certain foods were considered healthy in one culture, were considered cancer causing in another culture. So even during my time in Hong Kong, I had known about Ayurveda.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  But in Western naturopathy, I was told that sugar and dairy causes cancer. It messes with your hormones, so you've got to cut that out. But whereas in India, it was fine to do that. But when I was in this melting pot of cultures, it was so confusing that no matter what I ate, somebody was telling me, "That's bad for you." So I felt I was doomed, no matter what I did or what I ate. The other thing that was happening is that when I was having Western treatment, the naturopathic, the people, the naturopaths were telling me, "Your body is already dealing with something toxic. It's dealing with cancer.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  You don't want to weaken it by putting more toxins. Do you know that chemotherapy kills all your white blood cells?" And I was getting an earful of that. When I was with the medical people, they were saying, "Oh, all that naturopathic stuff is pseudoscience. You can't go in that direction." So I just couldn't win. And I mean, and I have learned so much from going through that and feeling that fear and feeling that no matter what I do, I'm going to be feeling fear. It was so hard to climb out of that fear.

• 47:28Jonathan Cohen?

  And we know from a medical perspective that the mindset of the person has a biological impact.

• 47:35Mayim Bialik?

  We know that the mindset of the doctor administering treatments can also have an impact on the efficacy.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:44Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you for taking us through, you know, kind of these years of the journey. Because, you know, it's one thing for us to kind of come in hot and be like, "You had cancer and now you're alive." That's not the whole story. You've given us, you know, some of the introduction here into how you arrived at...

• 48:02Mayim Bialik?

  A cancer diagnosis that had progressed to stage 4B.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:06Mayim Bialik?

  You were given essentially a terminal diagnosis.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:11Mayim Bialik?

  There are no more treatments or interventions that can be administered. Even if they could be, your body does not have the strength to sustain.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:22Mayim Bialik?

  You know, even finding a vein, right? Being put through any of these treatments. You went into organ failure.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:28Mayim Bialik?

  Which is a progressive, you know, process. You went into organ failure and you fell into a coma.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:35Mayim Bialik?

  The unbelievable and miraculous part of your story is that your consciousness was sustained throughout your coma.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yes, it was.

• 48:47Mayim Bialik?

  When was the first moment that you realized that you were present even though your body was not?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  While I was lying on the hospital bed. Uh, my physical body was lying on the hospital bed. And I started to notice that I wasn't feeling any more pain. And it felt as though my breathing wasn't laborious anymore. But it's, I didn't notice that I probably didn't even need to breathe because when you're not your physical body, you don't need to breathe. But I noticed that suddenly I was feeling light and the pain was just gone. The discomfort of not being able to breathe, it was just gone. And the fear was gone.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  But at the same time, I was aware that my family around me were distraught because, and then I could hear what they were saying. And I didn't know that I was in a coma. I thought I was awake and I was hearing all this. But I had no idea that my eyes were closed. I was in a coma and they were talking about me while I was in a coma. I didn't realize at first. It took a little while for me to realize because I wanted to communicate with my family, who was so distraught. I wanted to say, hey, wait, I'm actually feeling better. I'm feeling fine. I feel really good. What's going on?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And that's when I started to realize, oh, I'm not exactly in my body anymore. And that's when I started to become aware, something is happening.

• 50:30Mayim Bialik?

  I want to give the the PS before we go back and go into the experience that you had. The PS is what you're about to describe that happened led to a transformation so significant and enormous that you eventually were discharged from the hospital with an essentially undetectable level of cancer.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:00Mayim Bialik?

  Within a matter of?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Five weeks?

• 51:02Mayim Bialik?

  Five weeks.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Three to five. Actually, it was three weeks that they could no longer find it, but they still kept me there. They said, "We're going to keep looking because cancer doesn't disappear like that."

• 51:13Mayim Bialik?

  You haven't met Anita. So with that framework, there's something that happened. How long were you in the coma?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Just over 30 hours. So not even two days, a little over a day.

• 51:28Mayim Bialik?

  And you had a cohesive experience of existing as your consciousness outside of your body?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:37Mayim Bialik?

  Can you give us a few examples that would support the notion that consciousness does not reside in the body or in the mind?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  So one of the things is that I heard my husband talk to the doctor where the doctor told, was telling my husband that these are her final hours. She won't even make it through the night. I didn't realize. I actually saw him telling my husband that. I saw them face to face, but they were outside the room and they were down the hall at the nurse's station, which was later verified. I was aware of things like while I was in the coma, the doctors were taking fluid out of my lungs and the nurses were trying to find veins to put tubes

• 52:31Speaker 01

  into. So I was aware of all of this happening. I was even aware that my brother, who was in India at the time, was trying to get to the airport to get on a flight to get to me before I actually died. But nobody had told me that, but I was aware. It was like I could see him, but I use the word "see" loosely because we don't have eyes. So it's like a 360 degree peripheral vision awareness, but it's beyond the hospital room that I was in.

• 53:09Mayim Bialik?

  Now, some people might be thinking, I'm just gonna say it. Some people might be like, well, I don't know what Hong Kong medicine was like when she was in the hospital, because she must have not been in a coma, right?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:19Mayim Bialik?

  She must have not been in a coma. But this is a modern, progressive facility.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:25Mayim Bialik?

  And there are very specific markers that we use clinically.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:31Mayim Bialik?

  To say this person is in a coma. It's usually a lifting of the eyelids. There's pupil stuff they do, the light, just like if you've seen any TV show where they're like, are they alive? This is not a new designation of physiological existence that we don't know about. You were clinically in a coma. You should not have been hearing anything. You should not have been experiencing anything, nor should you be able to recount the volumes of information that you came back with knowledge of.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yes, and the hospital I was at, it was one of the top, one of the top hospitals or cancer hospitals in Hong Kong. And one of the doctors who has actually come on to my YouTube channel to speak, Dr. Brian Walker, he's British, he's Scottish, and he was my doctor at the time. And he's, he just, he came on it to give me credibility so that people could see that it really did happen. And he was there throughout the whole thing.

• 54:35Jonathan Cohen?

  So tell us about the moment you realized that you were not in your body.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  At that moment, when I started to become aware that, hey, I'm feeling pretty good. That's when I started to realize, like, I'm feeling pretty good and my family are there.

• 54:53Mayim Bialik?

  It's because you don't have a body.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I noticed that my breathing wasn't labored, the pain was gone. And that's when I realized that I was not in the body. But then it didn't end there.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  What, the biggest thing I noticed was that the fear was gone. The fear of death, the fear of the cancer, the fear of the treatments. That fear was gone. It was just gone. It was, that was huge for me because you don't realize how big or how um, deep that fear is when you're in it. But when it's gone, you notice the void. It's kind of like when you're in a room with an air conditioner and you don't notice the sound of the air conditioner. But when it goes off, you're like, oh, wow, that was loud. In that state, I, I, I realized, wow, I had been living in so much fear.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  And not just from the cancer, long before the cancer. That's when that clarity hit me.

• 56:01Jonathan Cohen?

  But you like do a metaphorical cartwheel once you're realize that, hey, I'm just hanging out here. Like, maybe it's not linear time.

• 56:09Mayim Bialik?

  It's not. I mean, I think that's sort of what I wanted to, to get to. Is that what ended up kind of evolving? And it's, it's, it kind of came in waves from the way you describe it.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:22Mayim Bialik?

  Is that you kept feeling kind of a, an emotional connection to things going on. And then you kept like pulling away is the way you described it. You kept kind of pulling away and getting farther, right? From anything concrete. So there's something and, and other near death experiencers have described. You know, some of this and certain psychedelic experiences also have mimicked, you know, certain aspects of the way you describe it. You were flooded with a sense of awareness and freedom and an astounding clarity. Can you talk about that before we get to love?

• 57:05Speaker 01

  It was like I understood why I was there, lying in that hospital bed. I understood why I had got cancer. I actually understood for the first time, as much as we hate saying we caused it. I understood how I had allowed my body to get cancer. Um, I tell, it's a hard one. I'm not blaming the victim here. It's never anybody's fault when they're sick. But I could see the trajectory of my life and I could see.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  All the points in my life, the thoughts, the decisions I'd made that led to this point of me lying there on that hospital bed.

• 57:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Was it like a life review, like snapshots? How did the information come to you?

• 57:53Speaker 01

  So it was like a life review. And here's where mine is a little weird and different because when people talk about a life review, you know, because one thing is I could feel everything my family could feel, which I could, I was feeling everything.

• 58:09Mayim Bialik?

  You felt like you became people.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yes, I became them. I could feel, I could feel how distraught my family was. I could feel the hopelessness of the doctors. I could see my Dr. Walker, who is my family physician, he was, he felt hopeless and I could feel it. And my mom was holding on to his arm, saying, isn't there anything else we can do? And I could feel my mom was wishing that it was her instead of me. You know, I could feel all of these things. At the same time, I could see everything in my life that caused me to get to this point. And where other people often talk about all the places where they hurt other people

• 58:54Speaker 01

  and they could feel the hurt of the other person. What I was seeing was where I had been hurt my entire life, where other people had hurt me or where I had allowed myself to be hurt because I didn't accept help. I didn't say no. I was always the people pleaser. I was always there for everybody. I let everybody cry on my shoulder, even when I didn't have the bandwidth or the time. So I could see how I had downtrodden myself or allowed myself to be hurt. So it was my own pain that I was seeing an entire trajectory of. And so, wow, that's what led me to this point.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  That's how I squashed my little spirit and soul right down.

• 59:42Mayim Bialik?

  You're describing a version of what some people might describe as hell, but you weren't experiencing it necessarily as reliving the pain. You were gaining a clarity of the trajectory of your life that led to subsequent hurts over and over, so that the feeling that you were left with was, "Now I understand."

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:07Mayim Bialik?

  Not, "Oh, my God, my life was horrible."

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  No, it was a, "Now I understand, now I understand." It was really, that was the big emotion, the clarity, the, "Oh, I get it now. Why didn't I know this before? Why didn't I know that it's okay to stand up for myself? Why didn't I know I'm not a bad person if I speak out? Why didn't I know I'm not a bad person for having run away from that marriage? Because I really, my family had been ostracized for that. I was told no one would marry me after what I'd done. So, you know, internally, we're beating ourselves up. I didn't know that I'm not a bad person."

• 1:00:51Mayim Bialik?

  You were able to get in touch, or something touched you, that communicated basically what became your entire philosophy and life journey, from the time that you had this experience until now. Can you describe what the next level of feeling was?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  The next level of feeling was that I actually, for the first time, realized that I am incredibly powerful. I mean, we all are, but I had never known this. And I didn't know why this was hidden from me, from us, from everybody. I just realized, wow, we come in with this incredible power. We have all this energy, energy is the only word I can think of, or soul. We have this incredible, powerful energy or soul at our disposal to express through this physical body, and we don't know how powerful it is.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  So I call, I use the term magnificent. I realized that I am an amazing, magnificent being, and we all have access to that, but people just don't know it.

• 1:02:11Mayim Bialik?

  Talk about what the source of that is for you.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  The source of it is, I call it the all that is. It is the collective of everything that has ever lived, everything that is yet to live, every life form. Recently, I've been using an analogy of a mirror ball. It's like if, it's like every single soul, not just on this planet, but even off planet. Because I'm sure there are probably beings on other planets and other, who knows? Yes, there has to be, yes. But every single life form is a life form. And we're all connected. And that's what I realized. When we don't have these physical bodies,

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  there is no hard boundary to separate you from me. That's why I feel, when I'm not in my body, I feel what you're feeling. And you feel what I'm feeling if you're not in your body. People who are empaths are less in their body. They feel what other people are feeling. And so we don't realize it because we believe we adjust these physical bodies. But we are so much more, that's actually bigger than the body, but we don't see it. And that part of us is connected with everyone else. We could say it's connected with strings or with waves, but we are all connected.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And because we're all connected together totally, we are the all that is. We are one. And I felt so connected to that.

• 1:03:52Mayim Bialik?

  Talk about the experience you had of love. And I think the hardest thing, you know, is for you to describe something that is indescribable. But you, you talk about sort of what your experience was of unconditional love. What was that like?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  So for the first time, I felt like I was enveloped in this feeling of unconditional love. And it was a feeling of, I was loved just because I exist. I didn't, for the first time that I can remember.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I realized that I didn't have to do anything to feel loved. I didn't have to be anything. I didn't have to try any harder. I didn't have to please anyone. I didn't have to win anyone over. I was loved just because I existed. So it felt like for the first time I could actually relax. I wasn't acting, performing, trying to win someone over. I'd spent a lifetime doing that. And that feeling was so beautiful and refreshing and yet alien. It felt so new to me. And so what I noticed was that with the absence of fear,

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  that void was filled with this feeling of just love. In this feeling, you feel safety, you feel trust, you feel that you can just completely relax and be yourself. And you're not going to be judged. You're not going to be shamed. For me, shame was a big one throughout my life.

• 1:05:30Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that you described was that it didn't feel like a dream. It felt like you had been dreaming your entire existence and you had finally woken up. Like movies like The Matrix, right? Talk about what would it be like to sort of pull the veil back and see the the nature of our true existence. Can you describe sort of what that felt like?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  It felt like I had woken up from the dream. You know how sometimes when you have, you're having a a bad dream and you're so relieved when you wake up that it was just a dream? That's what it felt like. It felt like, oh, wow, that was just a dream. Oh, my God, I'm not, I, I, you know, I'm not in all that pain and all that fear. It felt like such a relief and it felt so real. And the clarity, the understanding made it feel like this is reality. This is the truth, not that what I was living.

• 1:06:33Mayim Bialik?

  Did you go to heaven?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And it depends on what one believes heaven is. And the second thing I want to say is that my own interpretation of heaven.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Is that I believe heaven is a state of being and not a place. And so I believe I was in that state where it was just incredible. And I don't want to undermine anybody's religious beliefs. I'm very respectful of everybody's beliefs. But I always feel that I just need to qualify what I mean when I say things.

• 1:07:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you believe in a divine intervention? Or just this collective love consciousness?

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  I believe in a collective love consciousness. But but that's what I call the divine. In other words, I don't I don't see God as a being that is outside of us. But I see God as a source of divine energy.

• 1:07:46Mayim Bialik?

  That we can commune with.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  That we commune with.

• 1:07:48Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  That we commune with. And we express this energy through us as well.

• 1:07:57Mayim Bialik?

  My children call that cheating. When I tell them that's like my conception of God.

• 1:08:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Only because all religions have personified God in a way that is not that.

• 1:08:06Mayim Bialik?

  And even beyond personification, but that like, oh, there's the reward and there's punishment. And it's like, no, it's like breath and it's like, yeah, right.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  There's no reward. All reward, punishment, all that's a here thing, not a there thing.

• 1:08:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think that the earth is an experiment for souls to come and learn lessons? And that this is all sort of some simulation as you talk about waking up?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  It could be. I, you know, I think that we came here as part of our evolution, the soul's evolution. But I think that I don't even think that. I know that from the perspective of being beyond the body, we do a lot of really stupid things here. I don't know.

• 1:08:49Mayim Bialik?

  We spend our time worrying about a lot of things that I think you've experienced are simply not as important as we think they are.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  And causes harm. For example, from that perspective, let's say from the perspective of where we go to when we die and you look back, it seems crazy that we still have wars. It seems crazy that we still think we can kill people. Nobody has the right to kill other people. It's crazy the amount of resources and money we use to kill people and how little we use to help and feed people. All of this, when we look back on our lives, we will see, you know, even the amount of time we just spend chasing after stuff just to compete for no

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  other reason, but just to feel like we're ahead of everybody. All these things make no sense from the other realm.

• 1:09:47Jonathan Cohen?

  So is the other realm like, hey, how come they can't get it? Or they're patient and they're like, well, they're gonna learn and evolve and they're hopefully gonna bring this consciousness to earth?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  My sense is that from the other realm and what I sensed while I was there, it's like, let's see if we can help them get this sooner.

• 1:10:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Because that's where I think it's a little bit like a game designed or an experiment designed to see if these humans can absorb and integrate this consciousness from the other realm. If there are, for lack of a better word, puppet masters on the other side, hoping that we will wake up.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yes, they're hoping that we will wake up. They're trying to help us wake up. So we have free will. They're not going to control us. They're not gonna make us do anything. They're not gonna annihilate us. We all have free will. But they are there hoping that we will wake up. They're there to help us wake up. They're not there to punish us, but they're there to guide us and push us to wake up.

• 1:10:49Mayim Bialik?

  Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about what you sort of encountered? And then I want to kind of get to what it was like to... Know that you were going to be returned to your body and what that choice was like.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  I did encounter, um, my dad had passed away 10 years prior, my best friend who had passed away. I did sense them around me, their, their, um, essences. So like they don't have physical bodies, but I did feel their presence around me, guiding me through this process. And, um, one thing that felt incredible to me, like a huge relief was that I felt nothing but unconditional love from them and particularly my dad, who I had always felt was disappointed in me. And so, but now I felt this unconditional love from him and that felt really good.

• 1:11:48Jonathan Cohen?

  Was there a bit of a push and pull between being aware of your family members in the earth plane and the experience of being aware of people on the non-earth plane? Like, how did you sort of divide attention because you have a lot of very detailed understanding of what's happening in the hospital as well? Like, how, how did that work?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  So in the beginning, as I was, um, in the early stage of being in the coma, I was a little bit more here than there.

• 1:12:20Mayim Bialik?

  In terms of awareness?

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  In terms of awareness and I was being drawn by what was happening here in the physical and feeling for them more. But then I started to get pulled away. And I would get pulled away and then pulled back and then pulled away. But each time I was going further and further away from the physical. So I was, I started to become less and less aware of my family in the physical. And that's when I started to become more aware of things that were happening in the non-physical. And there was also a feeling of they're gonna be okay, they're gonna be okay.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  And whether that being okay meant that I was gonna die and one day they will join me in the future or whatever it meant, I didn't know. But it was just a feeling that it's okay. You don't have to worry about them.

• 1:13:16Jonathan Cohen?

  So if I understand it, it's like I'm concerned because all of a sudden you're having this huge empathic awareness of what they're going through.

• 1:13:23Mayim Bialik?

  But at a certain point she goes into a coma and not much is going on.

• 1:13:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, but in that coma state, you're like, oh, I'm really aware of everyone. I want to make sure they're OK. You probably feel the intensity of their grief and despair a lot. But the more you move away from that, the more almost intergalactic or otherworldly your experience becomes, and also the more love you have for them, knowing that it's like an interesting separation, right? It's like, you don't have to take care of them. There's nothing you can do, and they're going to be OK. So as you're feeling more love, you're actually giving them more love and separating from not, I don't want to pathologize it by saying codependent, but maybe a highly empathic response, instead of feeling their pain, now you're sending love to them, knowing

• 1:14:11Jonathan Cohen?

  that they're going to be OK. Do you then have a moment of realization about, oh, if I go too far here, like, what about that? Am I leaving that behind? Is there a concern about, you know, your body and what's happening? Or are you just immersed in the love and you're like, I'm just going to stay here forever? Is there an understanding of time?

• 1:14:30Mayim Bialik?

  She's experiencing her consciousness outside of her body. It's like tripping balls to like the millions level. Like, she's not, it's not a cognitive thing like that. She's like feeling the universe.

• 1:14:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Every now and again, you're feeling the universe. You're like, wait a second, I used to like that body over there. Am I ever going to return to it?

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  So, but my body was so sick, and my family had been suffering. No part of me wanted to go back into that body, because even though I loved my family, I truly believed that leaving my body was the best thing for them as well. I did actually believe that.

• 1:15:04Mayim Bialik?

  I hate to do this, but we're going to hit pause here. This is a critical point in Anita's story, but we have so much more to cover, and we will cover it in part two.

• 1:15:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss part two. And for more, check out Mind B Alex Breakdown on Substack, where we release exclusive content not released anywhere else, and join the Breaker community.

• 1:15:28Mayim Bialik?

  In part two, we're gonna hear literally what happens when Anita came back into her body, what she saw in the room, what she communicated, and what the medical journey was like to try and detect what happened to her cancer. We're gonna talk about what happened once she was released from the hospital, the life she began to live, the loneliness she started to experience, and how she began to connect again with a much larger audience, as it were, than she ever thought she would be able to have access to. She's also gonna talk about literally what she brought back from the experience, what undoing aspects of your life means, what a concept of unconditional love actually looks like, and how to deepen your intuition,

• 1:16:11Mayim Bialik?

  and what it means to tap into intuitive ability, what does it actually mean to raise your vibrational frequency, how does she believe that helped her heal, and how does she teach others to help them heal as well? We're so excited for you to hear part two, so please make sure you're subscribed, and from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.