A "must-read" for every cancer patient and care-giver (Anita Moorjani NDE)

Anita Moorjani had lymphoma. After years of battling the disease, she came to the end of the road. She was rushed to hospital, unable to move, and her husband was told that she was dying. And yet she lived through the experience.

This is how the story begins:

I had cancer (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma), and on this morning, I could not move. My husband rushed me to hospital, where, after doing scans, they diagnosed me with grade 4B lymphoma (the highest grade). The senior oncologist looked at my report and told my husband that it was too late, and that my organs were now shutting down. I only had 36 hours to live....

Anita returned from the brink of dying, and brought back knowledge on how to heal and how to stay healthy. After her near death experience her organs returned to normal functioning and her cancer disappeared. The message she imparts is that her healing experience need not be unique.

Here is her tale, in print. And here is an interview. I thank Upswing for the links.

Highlights: Anita describes herself as having been very fearful of cancer, and feeling that this fear contributed to the development of her disease. She describes cancer as an emotional illness. Two important lessons she learned in her NDE were to live fearlessly and to love herself. She realized that we are all far greater in consciousness than our limited minds, bodies and egos allow us to perceive. When we die we lose these restrictions and experience a realization of our true purpose.

I was shown how illnesses start on an energetic level before they become physical. If I chose to go into life, the cancer would be gone from my energy, and my physical body would catch up very quickly. I then understood that when people have medical treatments for illnesses, it rids the illness only from their body but not from their energy so the illness returns. I realized if I went back, it would be with a very healthy energy. Then the physical body would catch up to the energetic conditions very quickly and permanently. I was given the understanding that this applies to anything, not only illnesses — physical conditions, psychological conditions, etc. I was “shown” that everything going on in our lives was dependant on this energy around us, created by us. Nothing was solid — we created our surroundings, our conditions, etc. depending where this “energy” was at. The clarity I received around how we get what we do was phenomenal! It’s all about where we are energetically. I was made to feel that I was going to see “proof” of this first hand if I returned back to my body.

Much of what Anita Moorjani says about consciousness echoes what I learned from my meditation teacher. The only difference is that Anita Moorjani speaks about an individual consciousness that is part of the whole but somehow still conscious of its uniqueness, whereas according to the Tibetan meditation tradition individual consciousness merges into the whole after death the way a drop of water merges into the ocean. It may be that people who experience NDEs return before the final merging. At any rate, I found Anita's description of her experience deeply moving. Here is another excerpt from the interview:

NDERF: Can you elaborate a little more on how you now live your life, while being able to see “beyond the illusion?”

AM: One of the problems I have is that language is just so limited and inadequate in trying to explain what I am saying. It’s so easy to misunderstand and misinterpret the true feelings being conveyed.

First of all, to me, suffering is an illusion. And I wish there was a better word to use, because when I had cancer, and people would tell me it’s only an illusion, I would get even more frustrated. The feeling that comes is: “if it’s only an illusion, then why does it feel so real to ME???” and “So, how do I break thru the illusion??” So sometimes I hesitate to use the word illusion when others are suffering. It can cause more frustration. But right now, it is the only word I can think of to explain what it is I am trying to say.

When I was sick, I had thought that maybe the “illusion” is ... something that can only be viewed from the other realm, and while in this realm, we are “bound” to the illusion. I thought that as long as we are in this realm, it always remains “reality” to us. I never would have believed it possible to be able to see thru the “illusion” and still be able to come back and express life in the physical. But in order to do that, and come back and live life in the physical again, I had to be prepared to view life completely differently from others. Perhaps for some people, the thought of doing that is harder. It’s easier not to come back, than to live in a world of people who don’t view life this way...

The way I view life now, nothing exists in this world until we bring it into our consciousness/awareness. Nothing exists until we express it, either as an individual or as a collective. The more awareness we draw to something, the more real it becomes in the physical. As a collective, we are probably inadvertently creating our physical reality by default, unknowingly. But as individuals, we always have the choice to create differently than what is being created “out there”...

If I still saw the world through 3D eyes, putting physical before consciousness, then I would have to take the doctors’ words at face value when they said that it is medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to pass through the host body in such a short time without killing it. And it is also medically not possible for billions of cancer cells to just “disappear” just like that, without passing through the host body. And if I had to wait for the scientists to have proof FIRST, before I discovered that my consciousness overrides ANYTHING physical, then I would still have cancer!

Update August 30: Anita Moorjani has now written a book entitled Dying to Be Me.

Postscript Sept. 18th: And now here is a related story from a talk Dr. Depak Chopra gave 20 years ago, in May 1991:

Recently I had a patient with a very dramatic outcome... [H]e was one day repairing an antenna on the roof and he picked up a wire, but it happened to be live and had 12,000 volts in it. He was immediately electrocuted. The mechanism of death for this is ventricular fibrillation which is an electrical event in the heart.

He fell from the roof 15 feet to the ground and as luck would have it he fell with the right impact at the right place with the right location of his chest with the right amount of angularity to restart another current and defibrillate. So it's as if God called him and then changed His mind.

And you ask him, "Bob, what happened?" He says, "I went into the gap." I say, "What was there in the gap?" He says, "It was sheer unbounded joy. It was absolute, total bliss." You ask him, "Were there any thoughts there?" "No. I didn't have a mind." "Did you have a body?" "No. I didn't have a body." "So what was there?" He said, "l was just aware. " You ask him, "What were you aware of?" "I was aware that I was aware. But it was pure wakefulness. I was grounded totally and completely in the experience of my own immortality."

So much so, that he now doesn't know what the meaning of fear is. In fact, not only was he lucky to have this experience, but like a true scientist, he started experimenting in this field of pure awareness. He would go into the gap. Now he knew how to slip into it, and from there he would put his attention on his leg which had completely burned. There was no muscle - nothing. His femur was exposed to the atmosphere. Over the course of 2 years, by diving into the gap, projecting his awareness from there, he has actually regrown a new lower extremity. Because he found that place from where everything was created. It's his own Self. It's his own Self.

Related link: Anita Moorjani quotes for energy healers

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, NDE survivor and healer

Interview with Dr. Joyce Hawkes, a scientist who had a near-death experience after a domestic accident and spontaneously developed the ability to heal. I thank Upswing for the link.

Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's successful cancer cure?

This is not energy healing, but an alternative medical approach to treating cancer that seems to get better results than standard treatment. Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his son and colleague, Dr. Gregory Burzynski, are interviewed by Dr. Mercola:




And now see the the movie on Dr. Burzynski's struggles with the Texas Medical Board, the FDA and the American Cancer Society, who, according to the film maker, tried to shut him down and bankrupt and jail him, while at the same time the U.S. government was trying to patent his discoveries:



And here is a commentary on the movie by Jennifer Hawke, a "mama and an MD".

And now a website with testimonials: www.burzynskipatientgroup.org. On the right hand side you will see a list of names and cancers, and as you click on each name, a testimonial will come up.

Update, Dec. 24: I've received some criticism for this post from people who pointed out to me that what Dr. Burzynski does is not in any way related to energy healing, the topic of this blog. People have also told me that Dr. Burzynski is highly controversial and that the movie is little more than an "infomercial" for his clinic. I have no way of evaluating the correctness of either Dr. Burzynski's position or the criticisms leveled against him. My position on the matter is that people should have a right to choose their own treatment, and that no government or agency should step in to deprive them of this right by making sure that only orthodox treatments (some of which have proven to be dismal failures) are available to them.

Embrace, Release, Heal: an inspiring look at healing from cancer

Embrace, Release, Heal by Leigh Fortson is now available for purchase from Sounds True. This book is a must-read for anyone and everyone who has had reason to visit my blog, everyone who suffers from cancer, has a loved one with cancer, or just fears it based on the statistics that are regularly produced to scare us. IMHO it should be sold as a companion volume to The Emperor of All Maladies, which has much information to offer but little hope. Dr. Mukherjee should be gifted with a copy of this book.

Here is a link to the foreword and the introduction, and here is an excerpt in Leigh Fortson's own words:

I include here both my own [story] and the stories of other people who’ve had cancer. Most were told they would die. They didn’t. After exhausting what conventional medicine had to offer, they walked away from the grisly prognosis and found another way. Some call it a miracle. I’ve come to believe it’s just the way things work when we get out of our own way. These stories will help inspire you to see the infinite possibilities that may be available to you, but that your doctor will likely dismiss. They reflect the truth that cancer can be effectively treated physically, emotionally, and spiritually through a different, more life-affirming paradigm than conventional medicine traditionally offers. These stories demonstrate why the conversation around cancer must be changed. If nothing else, I urge you to read all of them. Simply put, they are good medicine.

Many readers of this book share my view of how valuable it is. Here is a link to some reader reviews on Amazon.

And here is Tami Simon interviewing Leigh Fortson about the book on Sounds True.

What I've learned from 12 years of energy healing

Some thoughts on healing offered for your perusal. Please feel free to argue with me and to present your own thoughts and experiences in the comments section.

Just because you will it, it won't necessarily happen

Helping someone heal is not about willpower. It's about an elusive quantity known as "intent". You somehow get the ball rolling and then both you and your client simply watch the healing "happen". This is the hardest thing for fledgling energy healers to learn. Every healing method emphasizes the necessity for "getting out of the way" and offers techniques to accomplish this, but few students get what it really means. The best analogy comes from Matrix Energetics: it's like dropping a pebble in a pond. The pebble is your intent. You won't get any ripples (effects) until you let go.

If you are unsuccessful at healing, you need to see how you get in the way and also take a look at how your client gets in the way. For instance, if you see your client frowning with concentration trying to direct the energy to a specific location in his body, he is not in the right mindspace for healing. You too get in the way by "trying", i.e, by making an effort. What Yoda said about "the Force" also applies to energy healing: "do or do not; there is no try".

Cancer patients find it very difficult to want things for themselves -- and this may be a significant factor in their disease

For a while we required cancer patients to participate in their healing by doing a process called "cycling". By "cycling" here I mean "image cycling", which requires a list of at least 20 things that a person wants that do not involve others, creating images of them, and then flashing the images rapidly in front of the mind's eye like a super-fast slide show.

We quickly discovered that most cancer patients have extraordinary difficulty creating such a list. Many cancer patients tend to put the needs of others before their own, especially those of their loved ones, and so have a problem with "selfishly" wanting things for themselves. The possibility has been raised that there is a correlation between this devaluing of one's own needs and developing cancer. I discuss this in greater detail in my post The mind is a powerful thing -- part 2.

I have often been surprised (and frustrated) to see my clients using the increased energy they feel after our sessions not for their own healing, but for doing things for their families. My exhortation that at least for the duration of their illness they need to become selfish and look after their own needs first invariably falls on deaf ears. E.g., a client who above all needed to rest exhausted himself by driving his child to a birthday party hundreds of kilometres away in order not to disappoint her. Another client with stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver painted his house and reorganized the garage so his family would not have to worry about these details after he was gone.

As a corollary to this there seems to be a need to go on with an appearance of normalcy for the sake of loved ones as long as possible, i.e., to just carry on as normal until carrying on is no longer an option. But since "carrying on as normal" was what contributed to the cancer in the first place, what may be required is change. (Dr. Cunningham of the Healing Journey program found a link between "patients making definite psychological shifts towards greater self-definition and self-reliance" and long-term cancer survival.)

We have seen some patients who lived in the shadow of much stronger partners, or recently lost such a partner to an illness, and did not know how to cope. Others had come to a point in their lives where they felt completely derailed and had no clue how to get back on track, or the energy to make the effort. All these people had extraordinary difficulty simply wanting things for themselves -- even knowing what to want. One practitioner told me that she can pretty well gauge a client's prognosis by his or her ability to learn to want.

Cancer patients have been operating for a long time on low energy reserves

Many cancer patients hardly seem to breathe, and are used to operating on a very low energy setting. Many of them have been burning the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle, and expending far more life energy than they've been taking in, for a very long time. When they find their energy levels raised through breathing practices or energy treatments, many of them feel uncomfortable with this unfamiliar sensation and immediately rush off to dissipate what they perceive as excess energy. The refrain will be "I felt so good that I had to do a 40 km bike ride" or "after our session I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill and did weights for an hour." Then of course once the energy runs out, as it invariably does, they crash. I don't quite know how to handle this, because exhortations "not to overdo things" have been about as effective as asking the client to become a bit more selfish in the interest of his or her own healing.

Animals and people heal differently

Animals heal faster than people. Whether it is an issue of metabolism, body size, or lack of a belief system that would interfere with the effectiveness of the healing, animals are a lot more able to respond to energy healing than people. My best patient to date has been a mutt named Bo, whom I treated ostensibly on his deathbed on two separate occasions 6 months apart. The first time his owners told me they thought he had cancer, the second time that he ate something poisonous. Both times he recovered, and he is still around, a normal, healthy dog. I wish for all our sakes that human clients were as responsive.

Animals healing differently from people in fact may not only be true for energy healing, but for healing in general, and it plays havoc with research. A 2004 article in Fortune magazine pointed to this effect as the reason so much promising cancer research turns out to be disappointing when transposed from mice to humans. Substances that heal transplanted human cancer in mice do not necessarily affect cancer in humans. We are similar to our animal cousins in many ways, but we are also much more complex. I suspect that this added complexity has to do with the complicated psyches produced by our complicated brains.

Sometimes miracles do happen

Every energy healing modality has stories of miraculous healings, which people tend to dismiss as being only anecdotal. In our group we've seen our share of miracles, the mutt named Bo only one among them. There was also the girl whose lung abscess and scoliosis cleared up within three weeks of our group beginning to treat her and a stage-4 pancreatic patient whose jaundice reversed.

The question from my perspective is what preconditions produce miracles and how we can re-create them on a regular basis. (I suspect that once we understand the miracle well enough to make it a daily occurrence, it ceases being a miracle and becomes the new science of the day.)

But the technique that produces miracles for the teacher may not work as effectively for the student

I discussed this in earlier posts as the dilution effect. Essentially if everyone who has to date taken an energy healing workshop from any of the great lights in the field were now able to duplicate the teacher's ability to heal, we would have little need for doctors and hospitals. Unfortunately most people go to workshops, diligently learn the technique, practice a little, get so-so results, then quit, or go on to learn another technique in another workshop.

The issue from my perspective is that the techniques being taught in these workshops may in fact have very little to do with the teacher's success in healing. I will take an example from physical medicine to illustrate what I mean.

Earlier this year I noticed, through the agency of the WYDDTY website, the stellar work of Dr. Patrick Kingsley, who is reputed never to have lost a cancer patient. I read the transcripts of an interview with him and discovered that what he did to treat people was no different from the treatments offered at many alternative cancer clinics, of which few will match his stellar track record. So what is different about Dr. Kingsley's treatments? I submit that it may be Dr. Kingsley himself, and what he adds to the healing through his own personality, belief systems, and energetic interactions with patients.

Another doctor in the U.S., the now famous Dr. Issam Nemeh, discovered that his patients fared better than the patients of other anaesthesiologists because he prayed for them. He firmly believes that the agency of his healing ability is prayer. It may be so -- but many others, in fact most others, pray with much lesser effect. So what is the difference? What does Dr. Issam Nemeh do/have that others who also pray don't? And could he teach others to pray as successfully as he does?

After 20-odd workshops I've come to the conclusion that the best way to learn from a teacher is to hang around with him or her for months or years on end, and to absorb not only his or her technique but the mysterious je-ne-sais-quoi that lurks behind it. I suspect that the technique offered is more often than not a sleight of hand that hides the real magic happening behind the scenes while you are busy looking somewhere else.

Is fighting cancer the right strategy?

My attention has lately been riveted by posters on the subway shouting "Join the fight!" and asking "Who are you fighting for?"

These posters are funded by the Canadian Cancer Society and they invite you to visit a website called "fightback.ca". On the website you are informed that "April is the month to fight back" and that "every three minutes another Canadian is faced with fighting cancer". The Society invites you to buy a daffodil in April to show your support, because the daffodil "is a symbol of strength and courage. A symbol of life. It says we will not give up. It says we will fight back. It says we will beat cancer. Join the fight."


We have been fighting cancer for a long time, with dubious results. Forty years ago President Nixon officially declared war on cancer, making "the conquest of cancer a national crusade." Thirty-seven years later, in 2008, a headline appeared in Newsweek: We fought cancer and cancer won. The thoughtful, well-researched article attached to this headline suggests that "After billions spent on research and decades of hit-or-miss treatments, it's time to rethink the war on cancer."

Indeed it is, not only because the war is being lost on multiple fronts, but also because it is being fought in and over the bodies of millions of cancer sufferers, who often end up as collateral damage. According to Ms. Begley, the author of the Newsweek article, the investment of two-hundred billion dollars in cancer research since 1971 has produced an estimated 1.5 million scientific papers, but no reduction in overall cancer deaths.

Most of the scientific studies funded by the campaign to beat cancer have had little or no impact on the lives of cancer patients in the real world. "Indeed, it is possible (and common)," Ms. Begley writes, "for cancer researchers to achieve extraordinary acclaim and success, measured by grants, awards, professorships and papers in leading journals, without ever helping a single patient gain a single extra day of life." Many exciting scientific findings turn out to be "interesting but irrelevant to patients," so perhaps throwing more money at more scientific research on the minutiae of cancer is not the right and only answer.

Cancer is a disease with many facets, and it morphs to find its way around the "weapons" thrown at it by science. "Just as cancer cells develop resistance to standard chemo drugs, so they are finding ways to elude the new targeted drugs such as Avastin, Gleevec and Herceptin," writes Ms. Begley. If one route to their proliferation is blocked, they will find another. According to oncologist George Demetri, "By the time there are 10 cancer cells, you probably have eight different cancers. And there are different pathways in each of the cells." That's how complex cancer is.

I would like to propose that what we want to do is not wage war on cancer, but find ways of "waging peace" with it. By that I mean we should not try to eradicate these rogue cells by every deadly means at our disposal -- often causing irreversible damage to the patient receiving the so-called treatment -- but instead aim to bring them back into alignment with the body. When we are waging war on them, they clearly outsmart us, and have been outsmarting us for decades. But what would happen if we spent our research dollars on "waging peace" instead? "Waging peace" is what energy healing therapies do.

Update Jan. 16, 2012: Also read my posts "Anatomy of a miracle", "Why is meditation a good prescription for cancer patients?", "Open letter to oncologists", "Using qi gong visualisations for cancer patients", and "Radical love and cancer".

The New "New Kid on the Block"

A while ago I referred to the Domancic Method as "the new kid on the block". After three years on the North American continent it has gained traction, with regular clinics through the Bioenergy Life Project, the brainchild of Zoran Hochstatter, who brought the method to America and the U.K. The method is easy to learn and straightforward, and practitioners report good results with many conditions, including frozen shoulder, thyroid irregularities, and even some cancers. It has no religious connotations of any sort and it successfully removes the mystique from energy healing.

The new "new kid on the block", somewhat awkwardly named the "Russian Organ Regeneration Method" (a.k.a. the "New Knowledge"), does the exact opposite. It hails, as you would guess from the name, from Russia, and its originators call themselves "spiritual scientists". The method has a non-denominational religious, or if you like, spiritual bend, in that it seems to work through a series of meditations that sound very much like prayer.

ROR is grounded in the recognition that we are all one with "All That There Is" and therefore co-creators of our reality. There are a series of videos on the method on Youtube in which people give testimonials of having regrown lost teeth and also internal organs that had been surgically removed. It may sound "far out", but having now attended a workshop on it with a friend, I wonder (along with my friend) whether what the Russians do is similar to what Dr. Issam Nemeh does quite successfully in his healing services in the U.S.: a sort of targeted prayer.

The Russian method was translated into German and then taught in English-language workshops in Mount Shasta and Thailand. The Thailand group also included some Australians. I thought this was highly symbolic of our new united world: a Russian method being taught by Germans to Australians and Americans in the far east. You can't get much more international than that. BTW the method is not only being translated, but also transposed, and going forward it may also be renamed. It will be interesting to track its evolution. My reading of the method is that its core concepts are quite powerful and that it will go a long way if those core concepts can be retained in translation. If you want to know more, take a look at the Organ Regeneration discussion group on Facebook.