Books to Change Your Life: Dying to Be Me By Anita Moorjani
Even if you don't have cancer, this book is for you, too.
The timing of life is funny. I actually had the chance to meet Moorjani and hear her speak at the 2024 San Diego Writer’s Festival (April), but I opted to stay at our booth and tell people all about elemental. Fast forward to November of 2024, I felt compelled to download the audiobook finally. Listening to it truly buoyed my spirits — for at least a few weeks, anyway. I’ll explain.
Back when I was diagnosed with cancer, I stopped working around my surgery. After desperately overworking for years and years, that pause dropped me into a delicious sense of mindful presence. Emotionally everything felt great. I wasn’t really worried or scared. People thought I was insane, but my overwhelming reaction to my diagnosis was relief. It wasn’t that I was close to death, but mortality had showed its face in a real way, and I have found there is such a deep sense of peace that accompanies true acceptance. I lost the felt-sense of that peace in the last several years (you know, life making you think things are more important or urgent than they are). Reading this book helped me tap back into that sense of peace. And although I don’t think everyone’s reaction to the book will be their own felt sense of peace, I think the message is too critical to ignore.
If you’re unfamiliar with Moorjani’s story: she quite literally dies in the hospital from her stage IV cancer, and in her near-death-experience (which I think should just be called a death experience?) she experiences an all-consuming understanding that her disease stemmed from her lack of self-worth. Within several weeks, she was cancer free, and has been ever since.
This aligns very much with all of the other books I’ve read on spontaneous remissions, and what my own healing journey has unfolded. Rather than having just the right pharmaceutical or supplement, it seems to me that true healing can be found in our own thoughts and feelings. Negative thought patterns have been proven to cause disease, and increasingly more research is being done around the ability to heal disease in the same way. It’s something humans have known and have been practicing since the dawn of time.
The book itself isn’t a literary masterpiece, but the content is simply too important to skip. It’s not a super long book, and I blitzed through the audiobook. I suspect that for some, the message might not land right now. Like, it won’t quite make sense in your own life until it does. But isn’t that the beauty of other people’s stories? They stay with you as a kernel of recognition that gets called upon at the least expected moment. The book speaks a lot to certain personality types — ones that align with how Moorjani lived her life before her NDE (read: highly sensitive, people-pleasing), so if you resonate with that, I think this book will be mission critical for you to read.
In essence, the book is an invitation into universal shared experience, cancer prevention, and the beauty of true, everlasting Love beyond romantic love. It is really a call-to-action to ALL humans, and I urge you to add it to your reading queue.