Summary Series: You don’t have to die to learn how to live
Summary Series
You are too busy to read clinical research papers and have many books waiting to be finished. Time is precious, so welcome to our Summary Series, where we do the hard work of reading these then round up the clinical research or nuggets of wisdom from books and speakers for you.
Photo of Anita Moorjani
Source: https://www.optionstheedge.com/topic/culture/book-review-anita-moorjani-tells-her-near-death-experience-cancer-dying-be-me
Editor’s Note
You don’t have to die to learn how to live. Start now. With love. With courage. As yourself.
Five key takeaways we have from Anita Moorjani’s “Dying to Be Me”
1. Self-love is the most important thing
“One of the reasons I got cancer is because I didn’t love myself… When you love yourself, you find no need to control or bully other people nor do you allow other people to control or bully you.”
Self-love is not a good-to-have luxury — it’s the foundation of a meaningful and healthy life. When we love ourselves, we stop abandoning ourselves to please others. We show others how to treat us by how we treat ourselves.
2. Live life fearlessly
“Fear doesn’t keep you safe. Love keeps you safe… I feared cancer. I feared eating the wrong foods. I feared displeasing people. I feared failing.”
Anita realized that fear had infiltrated every part of her life—and that it was suffocating her soul. Letting go of fear doesn’t mean being reckless; it means trusting life and acting from love, not anxiety.
3. Embrace joy, laughter, and lightness
“Laughter and joy are more important than any other spiritual activity… If we had more laughter, we’d need fewer hospitals and prisons.”
We’re born knowing how to laugh, but over time we lose touch with joy. Anita believes that playfulness and humor are not just luxuries—they are healing forces.
4. Life is a gift—even the challenges
“People think the cancer was killing me. But actually, I was killing myself before I got cancer. The cancer saved my life.”
Anita now sees the health crisis as a gift—a wake-up call that reconnected her to her soul. Challenges often feel unbearable, but they can become doorways to profound growth and clarity—if we allow ourselves to see them that way.
5. Be unapologetically yourself
“Be as you as you can be. Shine your light as brightly as you can. Love yourself unconditionally, and just be yourself.”
This is perhaps the most powerful takeaway: You were never meant to fit in—you were meant to be you. In a world that rewards conformity, being authentic is a radical act of self-love.
Background on “Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing”
Anita Moorjani was born into an Indian family in multicultural Hong Kong. From a young age, she struggled deeply with her identity. As a girl raised in a traditional Indian culture, her voice was often silenced by gender norms. At the same time, she was educated in a British school, where values like independence and self-expression clashed with what she was taught at home.
Caught between two cultures, Anita became a people-pleaser—afraid of judgment, conflict, and disappointing others. “I suppressed who I was in order to be liked,” she later wrote in her memoir, Dying to Be Me (Hay House, 2012). “I believed that I had to work really hard to be worthy of love and acceptance” (Moorjani, 2012).
When a close friend and her brother-in-law were both diagnosed with cancer, Anita became terrified. She radically changed her lifestyle—avoiding toxins, switching diets, and obsessively reading wellness books—not from a place of empowerment, but from fear. “I was living a life of fear of cancer, fear of food, fear of displeasing people. I feared everything,” she shared in her TEDx talk (TEDxBayArea, 2013).
Then, in 2006, Anita herself was diagnosed with end-stage lymphoma. After a four-year battle, her body shut down. She slipped into a coma, and doctors gave her only hours to live.
But what happened next changed everything.
In that state of deep unconsciousness, Anita experienced what she describes as a profound near-death experience (NDE). “I felt surrounded by a feeling of complete unconditional love,” she recalls on her website. “I understood that I was dying—not because I had cancer—but because I had allowed fear to erode my soul” (anitamoorjani.com/my-nde).
She came to a stunning realization: “The cancer wasn’t killing me—I was killing myself” (TEDxBayArea, 2013). She was told that if she chose to return to life and embraced her true self, her body would heal—and it did. Within weeks, all signs of cancer disappeared.
Reference
Moorjani, A. (2012). Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing. Hay House.
Moorjani, A. (2013). TEDxBayArea: Dying to Be Me. TEDx Talk Transcript via SingjuPost
Moorjani, A. (n.d.). My NDE. anitamoorjani.com
Editor
Janice C
