I want to go back to just a couple of years prior to my introduction to Mary Jane. I was working as a private duty nurse caring for an older than me but still very young woman who was receiving hospice care. As I got to know her husband, he introduced me to a book that his sister had given him, Dying to be Me, by Anita Moorjani. I was deeply intrigued by his recall of Anita’s story. And so on that very same night, while they slept, he in their bedroom and she in her hospital bed in the living room, I began reading the book as I sat at her bedside.
The author, as she tells it, was imminently dying in her hospital room.
She wasn’t expected to make it through the upcoming night. She slipped into a coma and entered the “other side” where she instantly acquired unknowable knowledge. She understood how every thought contributed to her becoming so ill that she ended up on her deathbed. She realized that she was a people pleaser who had made all of her decisions based on fear, guilt, feelings of inadequacy and a victim mentality.
Additionally, she could see her brother on the airplane as he was flying in to tell her goodbye and she could hear the conversations of doctors whom were down the hall and far out of earshot. Anita was so transformed by both the knowledge she acquired as well as the unconditional love which she received during her near death experience, that she chose to go back into her body. Her story stuck with me and for days, after finishing the book, I could think of nothing else. In many aspects, her conundrums paralleled my own.
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Anita, a rebel at heart, was born into a Hindu family. However, she had been indoctrinated in multiple different afterlife belief systems which left her confused. When she was a child, her father moved the family to Hong Kong. There, her parents took her to a Hindu Temple to worship. Simultaneously, she was a student at a mostly British Catholic school where the nuns taught her Christianity. And on top of that, her Chinese nanny taught her Buddhism. When she grew up, she wanted to live as an independent woman outside of the arranged marriage tradition.
She suffered from guilt because she chose herself by running away just three days before her wedding.
Later, her closest friend, as well as her brother in-law, died from cancer. She became riddled with fear and hyper-focused on cancer prevention. She avoided things like microwaves, certain foods and plastics only to eventually be diagnosed with cancer. I could relate to her all the way down to the microwave thing. When I was introduced to Anita’s book, I was still new to Arizona, the state in which I intended to eventually enroll in naturopathic physician school.
In the meantime, I had been studying herbs, nutrition and alternative medicine on my own. And as I did, I started to develop a semi-anti-allopathic mindset. I can see now how my cult mind made me think that to be for naturopathy, I had to be at least somewhat against allopathy. And maybe I leaned towards black and white thinking anyway. Either way, when I read the book, it made me question my beliefs and my mindset. However, I was still only able to absorb part of Anita’s message.
I had a very shallow understanding of unconditional love.
My cognitive dissonance was still so great. I did understand fear, though. And I knew that the law of attraction and Biology of Belief were all about moving away from fear. And so I delved deeper into those topics while moving my naturopathic school plans to a back burner even though it was my own cancer scare back in NC, that drove me deeper into the study of naturopathy. Above, is a video in which Anita talks about fearless living.