Speaking About My NDE at IANDS

foreign I feel really blessed to be here because if the doctors were right I wouldn't be here the last day of my life should have been February the 2nd 2006. on that day um I went into a coma because I had end-stage cancer I had lymphoma which had started four years prior I had been diagnosed in 2002 in April of 2002 and it started with a lump on my neck on the left side of my neck and over the years over the four years it had progressed so that it had progressed and it had metastasized so I had tumors some of them were the size of lemons from the base of my skull all around my neck under my arms through my chest all the way down to my abdomen during that course of time as the cancer progressed what also started to happen was things like my muscles started to deteriorate my body stopped absorbing nutrition so by the time I was at end stages I weighed about 83 pounds my lungs had filled with fluid so I had trouble breathing I would if I would lie down I would choke on my own fluid because my lungs were always filled with fluid if I would walk I would get out of breath every few paces and I would have to sit down so I would spend most of my time in a wheelchair being wheeled around by other people I was also connected to an oxygen tank I had an oxygen mask on my face all the time um I hated going into hospitals because I found hospitals depressing and I would always feel that I I'd come out feeling even worse from hospitals so I wanted to spend as much time at home as possible so I would go in and out of hospitals for treatments but I would spend all my time between treatments at home so I was being cared for at home by my family my mother was there caring for me and my husband who never left my side he was he was really my my biggest support he was the person I really trusted more than anybody during that Journey and we also had a full-time nurse who would come in in the morning and she would leave at night so on this particular morning on February the 2nd 2006 I didn't wake up I was at home and I didn't wake up and my body started to swell up and my husband got really worried he thought okay this is it these are my final hours and so he called the doctor right away the doctor said to rush me to the hospital and there was my regular doctor and my my regular doctor had called the most senior oncology oncologist of that hospital to come down and when he took one look at me he said to my doctor that this is it these are her final hours she's not going to come out of it because her organs have now shut down so my organs were finally shutting down one at a time my kidneys my liver and so on so they started connecting me to all these tubes in the hospital they they wheeled me into the Intensive Care Unit and they put in all these tubes just to keep me alive there was a nutrition tube something connected to my heart and something for my breathing and so on and obviously all this time I was in a coma and couldn't see anything they were doing but actually I could unbeknownst to everyone around me I could see and feel and hear what everybody was doing everybody that was treating me around my body I could feel all the tubes I could see them putting tubes into my veins and I could see they were having trouble finding veins and there was one nurse saying her veins have retracted what are we going to do there was another one that said it's hopeless anyway and I could feel that they knew that I was going to die anyway and it was hopeless anyway the doctors were frantically running around and then I reached a point where I was choking and I was aware that my physical body was choking and one of the doctors was called in and he removed the fluid from my lungs so that I could breathe a little bit easier anyway during all this time I could even see that my husband was by my side holding my hand but I felt absolutely amazing I was not in pain anymore and I became aware that I was actually expanding away from my body it was not like I popped out of my body but it was more like my Consciousness my soul whatever you want to call it I call it the real me the real me started to expand and I started to feel that I was something far greater than this physical body that was lying there on the hospital bed and I could see my physical body the whole body lying there on the bed and it looked so small and insignificant because I was continuing to expand and feel greater and bigger and more powerful and for the first time in four years there was no more pain the pain was gone I didn't feel that heavy breathlessness and the best part was there was no more fear there was no discomfort but there was no fear at all I had been so scared I had been fighting and fighting and fighting to stay alive I was fighting the cancer and now the fight was gone and I felt beautiful amazing magnificent and then I felt what I describe as a feeling of unconditional love but it's the words don't do it justice because the feeling was something much much more much greater than a feeling of like we use we overuse the word love here in the physical world we you know we say we we love our phones our computers our stuff but no this was something really really much more powerful it was like I didn't have to do anything to deserve it or be worthy of this love it was like I was loved just because I existed and it's the first time I ever felt that in my life like I was just loved and I wasn't loved by a person that's what was so unconditional about it it wasn't one person loving me I felt like the whole universe loved me like every soul every essence everything every atom everything in the whole universe just loved me that's what it felt like but it also felt like I loved everything that's what was so Universal about it it wasn't like I was just receiving love it was like I was even feeling it for everyone and everything it was like I had entered into like a state of clarity and then I now now time is very different in that realm so I'm trying to put everything into a sequence but it doesn't happen in a sequence in that realm and I'll talk a bit more about that later it's like we process time as linear over here we recall things and we put them into a linear sequence but in that realm it felt like all of time was happening simultaneously all at once it was like I had 360 degree peripheral peripheral vision so I could see hear and feel everything at once but not just what was happening in that hospital room and I was in a hospital in Hong Kong by the way I could see here and feel things that were happening well Way Beyond the hospital room Way Beyond this life it was more like wherever I put my awareness there I was so I then became aware of my father my father had passed away 10 years prior to me having this experience and there he was I felt he was there to greet me it felt as though my father was wasn't the only person that was there but he was the first person I recognized and it wasn't his physical body it was more like like a pure Consciousness pure Consciousness or his essence or his soul there were other beings around but I didn't recognize them from this life my father and I when I was growing up my father and I had a very turbulent relationship because um my parents are Indian they're Hindus and we grew up in I grew up in Hong Kong and which is a predominantly Chinese city where the predominant religion is is Buddhism and my parents though they put me into a British school so that I would learn to speak English because they wanted me to be able to speak fluent English and the British school was predominantly a Christian School a Catholic School actually so I had all these conflicting views on religion there was Buddhism there was Hinduism there was Catholicism and so on but anyway As I Grew Older so I would always challenge my parents about their religion because I would say that how can any religion be One True Religion because there is many religions here in this country in this town we live in as there are nationalities of people anyways as I got older my parents wanted me to have an arranged marriage which I didn't want to have and I and and I would say that but my British friends don't have to have arranged marriages why do I but in our culture apparently it's the best thing that a parent can do for their daughter is to get is to find a good husband a suitable husband for their daughter so finally I gave in and my parents arranged a marriage for me but two days before the wedding I ran away which um caused a lot of problems in my community I was I was ostracized from my community and I brought a lot of shame to my my family and the family of the of my then fiancee of the man I was supposed to marry and my parents were told by everybody in their community that no man or boy or whatever would marry me now that I had done this no parents would ever let their son come near me because of what I had done um so my parents had to carry that shame and I always carried that guilt that I had let um that I had let them down my father passed away before I married my husband Danny a beautiful man who um happens to also be Indian and when he told his parents that he wanted to marry me the first thing his parents said that's the woman that has a mind of her own laughs which in our culture is not necessarily a good thing so um so anyway um I had felt that I had always disappointed my father I'd never been good enough I'd never ever met his expectations I'd let him down I disappointed him I brought him shame I brought shame in our culture and he wasn't even there for my my wedding when I encountered my father in the other realm however all I felt from him and for him was pure unconditional love nothing more nothing less there was no judgment my feelings of guilt had gone when I just felt that pure unconditional love and I understood that he had been with me throughout my illness he had been with me even at my wedding to Danny he had been with my whole family all this time and I realized that there was nothing to forgive now the way we communicate in the other realm is not the same as we communicate over here because when we leave our physical bodies we don't have the same we don't have vocal cords um we we leave behind our physical bodies our vocal cords so when we communicate it's like from one pure Consciousness to another and it's like our Pure Consciousness just merges and I knew everything that my father wanted me to know there's no room for miscommunication because it's just too pure Consciousness just just merging together and like over here we learn we learn language we learn to communicate so that we can express our feelings but have you noticed that most of us actually use communication to hide our feelings in the other realm you can't be hide behind anything it's all known it's all transparent because what I learned was that when we cross over we don't just leave behind our physical bodies we leave behind our culture our race our gende --- ther who is alive in this physical life now my brother was living in India at the time that this had happened and um my brother was flying over to come and see me in Hong Kong as soon as he heard that I was in a coma so he only heard after I went into the coma as soon as he heard he was frantically trying to get on a plane to to come and see me in Hong Kong I was aware that he was on the plane I actually saw him on the plane and I was aware that I had to stay alive at least until he got to see me because I knew he'd be distraught if he missed me so I was aware of all these things happening and I also became aware of other lifetimes that I've had with my brother other lifetimes that I've had with my husband Danny I was aware that the whole time he was sitting there by my bedside he didn't leave during the whole time and I was aware that his purpose and mine was actually linked in this life but at the same time I felt that if I died it's still okay because we would still get another chance at another time another lifetime I reached a point where I realized that I couldn't go any further if I wanted to still turn back but no part of me wanted to turn back it was a point where I felt I had the choice of coming back into my physical body or going onward into death but that state was so beautiful that no part of me wanted to come back into my physical body my body was dying my body was suffering my family was suffering taking care of me so no part of me really wanted to come back but then my father started to to tell me that I needed to go back because it wasn't my time I needed to go back because there were some gifts that I still had on this side which I had not yet experienced it was like he was telling me that you've suffered and now there are some gifts waiting for you and then it was like I saw a vision of what my life would be if I chose to come back and I saw what the life of my family would be if I chose not to come back and I saw that if I didn't come back I actually saw that I even saw the medical records um that my family would be presented which would say that death due to organ failure from end stage lymphoma and I also saw that my husband would not live very long because our purposes were linked he would follow maybe in six months or a year or so after that but I saw that if I chose to go back into life that I saw myself actually speaking to people hundreds maybe thousands of people but I had no idea what I would be speaking to them about or how it would happen but I actually saw that I was supposed to go back and speak to people and I knew though that if I went back I wouldn't have to figure it out I wouldn't have to figure out what I'm talking to them about or how it would happen but there was something waiting for me there was a purpose and I had to go back to fulfill this purpose but in that moment I was still reluctant because I thought my body is dying of cancer and then it felt as almost as though in the next instant I felt this sort of state of clarity where I understood how I had got cancer I understood how every thought every decision every choice I had made in my life through every moment of time of my life up to that point had led me to being in that hospital bed in that moment dying from end stage cancer and I understood that now that I knew this truth and now that I knew the truth of who I truly am and who we truly are I understood that we are actually amazing magnificent powerful beings more so than we're ever told or taught I knew that now that I knew this if I chose to go back into my physical body my body would heal very very quickly and I felt as though it was in that moment that my father said to me now that you know the truth go back and live your life fearlessly and it was in those moments that I started to wake up from the coma and as I woke up from the coma I was in the hospital room and I looked around and my family were there and they were so shocked to see that I was opening my eyes I'd been in the coma for about a day and a half about 36 hours and my brother was there he just got off the plane my husband was there my mother was there and they were excited that I'd come out of the coma and I was very very groggy it was like I had one foot in each side and I kept saying dad is here Dad's here with us dad told me to come back dad said I was gonna be okay and so they realized that I was I was delirious that you know and and they called the doctor to come in and this was the doctor that had come to that had seen me after I had come into the hospital in the coma he had never seen me before that I had never seen him before that and when he walked in the room I called him by his name I said good afternoon Dr Chen and he looked really surprised he said how did you know my name I said you're the doctor that was here when I came into the hospital yesterday he said you came in in a coma and how would you possibly know my name and I said but you you were the one that was treating me you took the fluid out of my lungs when I was choking and he said you could not have seen that anyway he was really surprised but he tried to dismiss it and he told my family look she's still very weak she's still very Delirious she's still very sick she may have just woken up come out of it for a few minutes but she's not out of danger yet so then after he left the room I said to my husband why was he so surprised that I recognized him isn't he the one that said to you that I won't make it through the night that these are my final hours and my husband said how did you hear that he didn't say that here in the room he said that down the hallway at the nurse's station I said really I know I saw him and heard him say that I was so groggy that I was confused as to what I had seen here and what I had seen in the other side and I just started talking and I was um I I was so weak and so sick I didn't mention that even my I was my muscles had deteriorated so much and I was so weak that I wasn't even able to lift my head up my head was always down like this and I had these big open skin lesions which were big wounds in my neck and under my arm where toxins were coming out of my skin so I had these big bandages so I still looked really really sick but by about 24 hours later it started to sink in what had happened but I didn't quite understand it all I knew was that I had this purpose I had come back for a reason and that my dad had sent me back and I felt euphoric so I wanted to sit up I wanted to pull out the food tube I wanted to start eating proper food and start being alive again and I was telling my family I'm gonna be okay and it wasn't that I knew my body was going to heal it was more like I knew I was already healed but my body just had to catch up my understanding of time had changed and my understanding of Consciousness and illness everything had changed and I was so euphoric even though I was really weak and I wanted to sit up and I wanted to listen to music for some reason I wanted to listen to dancing queen over and over I don't know why it just reflected the mood I was so euphoric um and it was like I I just had this reason to be here and to experience life again and within four days they found that my tumors had shrunk 70 percent and I no longer needed the um I no longer needed the oxygen tubes I no longer needed the food tube and so they moved me to to a regular room out of the ICU and actually what the doctor said was that I was starting to become a disruption in the ICU so um so they moved me to a regular room and they continued to take tests to find the cancer which drastically just started to reduce and disappear and I remember one day like literally three weeks after I had come out of the coma and I was getting stronger and I was starting to get out of bed I was starting to walk I had to build up strength in my muscles and the skin lesions were healing and they had said they might need to do a skin graft to it that they would have to do surgery for the skin lesions because they said my body was not strong enough to heal them but even the skin lesions started to heal on their own so I remember one day three weeks after I had come out of the coma the doctors came into my hospital room three doctors came in and they said to my family we have a problem so my family my brother said what's the problem and everybody looked a little bit worried and they and so one of them spoke up and said we can't find the cancer so so my my my my brother said how is that a problem and these other doctors said if we can't find the cancer we don't know how to treat it so I said maybe you don't have to treat it if you can't find it and then the third doctor said no no it's not possible cancer doesn't just disappear like that but we're not going to give up till we find it now I don't say this to slander doctors because I have had a lot of support from doctors more than doctors I've had a lot of support from nurses they're all of them are beautiful people they go into healing and working with sick people for the purpose of helping and healing so I don't say this for that reason but more because I have started to talk more with doctors and medical people because I want them to start to change the way they look at illness it's more that than anything um so anyway at the end of five weeks I was strong enough and they let me go home and live my life cancer free um so here's where the hard part starts it's starting life over again but before I go into that part what I'd like to do is I'd like to share some photos of my journey if you'd like to see some and also that's my those are my parents what I want to say though before we get into the photos I didn't have any photos taken of when I was at my absolute worst by the time I needed a wheelchair and I was on an oxygen tank I refused to see people I refused to have pictures taken I had no idea I was going to come back again so um so these are my parents and we'll go to the next photo that's my father who I encountered in the other Realm that's my best friend she's the one on my left which is your right in the uh in the blue t-shirt and myself we grew up together we were best friends our whole lives and she died two years before I had the near-death experience and that's my husband and I when we got married Danny and myself 20 years ago that was when I started to get ill when it started to show I would never be far away from my bed okay so that was when I was really ill but still this was not my worst but I wouldn't have any photos taken after this so and here you can see that on my neck I had these open skin lesions which were covered in bandages myself with my dog oh that's Cosmo my dog but he's he's not alive anymore he passed away he was 14. he passed away four years ago and one of the reasons I hated being in hospital was because I missed my dog so much now oh uh yes so now I wanted to show you uh the next one this is my um a hospital report f --- and that you've come out on a different floor it's it can be very very difficult now imagine that you are that you were born blind and then one day you get sight for one day you get sight and suddenly everything makes sense the whole world makes sense now you understand how something can be sky and it can be blue at the same time because you now understand what blue means and what sky means you understand how something can be wooden and it can be a table and it can be Brown at the same time you start to understand you understand what distance means it all makes sense so even if you go back to being blind it all makes sense you navigate differently because you understand the world differently but imagine if you've had sight for one day and you go back to being blind but you live in a world where everybody else has been born blind and now you have to explain to them what you experienced and those of you that have had ndes you'll understand what I'm talking about and I can see your head's nodding how many of you hear about ndes you get it don't you thank you um it's and it's almost impossible to explain to someone who's not seen it so this is why sometimes I try to explain to people that just because you can't see it hear it feel it touch it it doesn't mean it doesn't exist just because you don't have that perception that ability to be aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist we were born with this awareness we were born knowing more or seeing more or being aware of more than we are as we grow up because we have to try and fit in and what I realized when I came back from my experience was that everybody was different from me I was different actually not they I was different I perceived the world differently I understood the world differently but I didn't have the words or the tools to explain to them because to me now the world seemed completely upside down I didn't understand why we had made the world the way it is today there was so much I didn't understand I couldn't watch TV anymore because I can't see people being killed I didn't understand why we teach different religions to different people because that only Fosters separation but actually when we die we're all part of the same Consciousness we're all like different fingers on the same hand imagine if we collaborated instead of competed we'd have a much better world I couldn't understand why we teach kids to compete instead of collaborate I couldn't understand why we train armies to go and kill other people the whole world did not make sense to me I use another metaphor to explain how how I see the world or how I see the afterlife I use a metaphor of a warehouse so if you can imagine that you're in a dark Warehouse where the lights are off and it's Pitch Black it's absolutely Pitch Black and the lights have never been on so you've always been in this dark warehouse and all you have to navigate through this Warehouse is one little flashlight to light your way and all you can see in this Warehouse is what this one little flashlight shines its Beam on although you have control as to where to shine it you can shine it there or there or there but you shine it to light your path and so even though that you've seen various different things you you haven't seen everything because your beam is so limited it's so small and it's so limited and all you see is just what your beam is shining on now Imagine One Day the lights go on and imagine when the lights go on you realize that you are in this huge Warehouse it is so huge that you can't see the ends you you can't see where the walls are but it's lined with shelves rows and rows and rows of shelves just shelves like bookshelves and the ceilings are so high you can't see them so the bookshelves just go on and on and on these bookshelves there are all kinds of things and I really mean every kind of thing on the shelf and you have not seen most of these things because your flashlight has was only shining on one thing at a time here and there randomly so you may have seen one percent of the things on the shelves 99 of the things you've never seen and there are beautiful things and ugly things and scary things and not so scary things and colorful things and dull things all existing simultaneously side by side there are scary and not so scary things existing simultaneously side by side positive things and negative things existing simultaneously all of them existing together now imagine that when the lights of the warehouse go off and you're back to one flashlight even though you can still only see one thing at a time you can only see what your flashlight is shining on you're now aware that that's not the only thing that exists just because it's the only thing that your beam can shine on doesn't mean it's the only thing that exists there is so many possibilities that exist simultaneously there are so many things that your beam the beam of your flashlight can be shining on but it just happens to be shining on that right now the flashlight is an analogy of your awareness your awareness is only focused on one thing on one point of time at a time and we believe that what we see here feel in this moment is what the world is like but it isn't it's just one little tiny point of that huge Warehouse where every possibility every probability exists at the same time you can be focusing on something negative but something positive can be right next to it but your flashlight happens to be focusing on the negative and let me give you an example those of you who've heard me speak before have done this but if you haven't play along with me I want you to look around the room and find everything in the room that is any shade of like a orange orangish pink red any shade in that family just look around and find any all the things that are anywhere near Orange or pink or red and commit them to your memory because I'm going to test you so look around as many as you can as many as you can commit them to your memory people's clothes things in their room bags whatever as many okay so face the front thank you face the front no cheating face the front now and close your eyes close your eyes now I want you to recollect as many things in the room that are blue having trouble okay open your eyes and look around as to how many blue things you missed quite a bunch so you know have you noticed when you buy a new car you suddenly notice a lot of people driving the same car they were always there but you just never saw them before so that the blue existed right under your nose but you missed it because you were so focused on the orange we do this all the time we focus on bad news we focus on things that scare us we do this all the time have you noticed recently in the last few years how much Focus there is on cancer awareness have you noticed all the cancer campaigns and all the billions of dollars we spend on research on cancer and all the adverts on cancer can you imagine if we put the same amount of energy made the same campaigns spent the same amount of money put the same amount of awareness on well-being awareness instead what a different world we'd have this is what I mean about the world feeling completely upside down and the wrong way around I felt that we were trying to create more Peace by grooming more armies we were trying to create more Health by focusing more on illness and we do this in everything we do and then we wonder how did we create such a messed up world well this is why and so I found it really really difficult to integrate back into into life and to talk to people and I I found that I started to become more reclusive I started to get a little bit more depressed then Danny suggested Danny my husband suggested to me that I should write about what I experienced so I just started writing and writing and I wrote everything everything that I've shared with you I just wrote it and wrote it and wrote it and I was living in Hong Kong there was no support group there's nowhere for me to go to to talk about these things um and so my my brother he was online he was in India and he was surfing the internet and he came across a website called nderf and I believe Jeffrey long is somewhere here in the audience and so I'm sure a lot of you have heard of nderf near near-death experience Research Foundation and so my brother came across that website and sent me the link so this was in August of 2006. I had come out of Hospital in March of 2006 and my brother sent me the link and and said there are people on this website that have had similar experiences so I started to read a few and I thought wow this is amazing there's people who will understand me there's people who I get and then there was a there was a button to click if you've had your own experience would you like to share it click here if you would so I clicked that on the website and then there was a forum and I started filling it in and there was a part where it said that you share your story here so I had already been writing and writing my story and so I just copied and pasted the whole thing into the form and hit submit and then what appeared on my screen it said it said something like please allow three weeks for someone to contact you of as to when it will be published on our website and this was I was in Hong Kong it was evening and I went to bed and the next morning I woke up and there was an email from Dr Jeffrey long and he said he said something like greetings your your um your near-death experience is is very is extremely interesting and then he asked me a few questions about the medical side behind it and what had happened and then he published my story on the site but what happened subsequently is people started discussing it on the nderf Forum so Dr Jeff wrote to me and said there are people who are discussing it on the Forum and they're asking questions would you like to chime in now I've found that when I started writing on that Forum that was like my therapy because people would ask me questions and I had the opportunity to talk about it freely in a safe place that talked about these things so I would so I would talk about it or write about it and I would write and write and write now on this forum I was just known as Anita M and I kept it that way I didn't um so I started trying to live a life here in the physical I started trying to figure out maybe some kind of freelance work I couldn't go back to work in a normal job because I didn't understand anymore because my my life had changed so much my life was too valuable to me to go to a job I hated to earn money to pay bills so that I could go to a job I hated I could not understand that life anymore so I worked freelance but I didn't tell anybody in the area where I worked in I started doing something called cultural training where I worked with people of different companies who had come to Hong Kong people from other countries who'd come to Hong Kong to work and I helped them to integrate i --- does Our Lives depend on us loving ourselves and that was the biggest lesson I learned that I had to love myself like my life depends on it I had never known that before I had grown up believing that it was selfish to love myself and so I had always put myself down and put myself last and treated myself like a doormat and allowed other people to treat me like a doormat because other people can't treat you in any way that you don't treat yourself you have to allow it first how many of you grew up believing that it's selfish to To Love Yourself quite a few and you may know differently now because you're all enlightened now you've all read the books and had your ndes and you're all enlightened now but we don't teach that to kids at school we never learned that at school that how important it is to love ourselves because when I was in that Realm I realized that God is not a being that is separate from me God is within me God is within you God is the infinite universe the infinite light that shines out from behind your eyes and when I realized that I am an expression of God and a peace of God an expression a facet of God that is expressing itself through me how can I not love me how can I not love you how can you not love you because to not love yourself means to deny the part of God that has chosen to express itself as you and through you that's what we deny when we don't love ourselves and only when we love ourselves and see God within ourselves are we truly able to see God within other people because if if we try to be unconditionally loving to other people without being unconditionally loving to ourselves it's really hard work it drains you it really does but when we are unconditionally loving towards ourselves and when we realize who we truly are as expressions of God then it becomes easy really easy because all we're doing is we are being the love that we are we're being the love that we came here to be I realized that the reason that I had lost my way and I suspect it's true for many of us um I realized that we're born knowing who we are because one of the biggest burning questions that I came back with was that why did I have to die to find this out what if I didn't come back what a waste of a life to find this out after we die and I realized that we are actually born knowing this we're born knowing the love that we are we're born knowing that we are an expression of God a facet of God here to express ourselves we're born knowing that life happens through us not to us we're not victims of Life situation we're here to experience experience life experience life happening through us we're born knowing this but we forget we forget a lot of it is due to our conditioning to our cultures to our education and so on and so slowly it starts to erode and we forget and then we become depressed and then we have midlife crises and so on but every single one of us is already spiritual we're born spiritual we don't need to work at being more spiritual we just need to remember who we are and be ourselves and one of the ways in which we forget as we grow up is by learning fear fear is the biggest thing that moves us away from love because every choice we make is actually made and is actually made either out of fear or out of love I've found that you can't do both you can't have both at the same time just like that flashlight just like being focused on the red or the blue you you're focusing on either one or the other you're focusing on either fear or love and I noticed that when I was growing up I always made my choices out of fear fear of the consequences I would choose a job because I was afraid of not getting ahead and so on even at school we're encouraged to choose the subjects that get us the best jobs the fear of not getting the best jobs we're not choosing the subjects that we're passionate about that we love to do and so we create a life built on fear not built on love that's why we get burnt out and depressed when I had cancer when I was diagnosed I was so fearful I was so fearful of the cancer and what did I do I researched everything on the internet I started to do I started to eat healthy but the thing is I became obsessive about it fear makes us obsessive and so I was I was so obsessive that I would order every supplement that was for cancer that was an antioxidant I would research every new product and I would read about how everything causes cancer everything from um from pesticides to plastic to microwave to Sunshine and so on and on and on and now I'm not saying not to be aware of things that are happening in the planet I'm not saying not to be healthy by all means be healthy but I did it out of fear not out of love today I still choose healthy foods whenever whenever I'm at home I eat healthy and sometimes it's harder when I'm traveling but I do it because I love myself I do it because I love my life I do it because I want to live long I don't do it because I fear cancer or I fear death I hate words like remission I would remove them from the dictionary if I could because it keeps people in the fear of cancer for five years I usually tell people as soon as you're cancer-free tell yourself I'm done with cancer now go live your life fearlessly go and find out what your passion is just be yourself love yourself be yourself and just go and find your joy I've realized that one of the most important things in life is to find your joy and do what you love because life is just for living and for laughing and not a lot more really not a lot more than that um when when I was just starting to um come out when I had come out of the coma it was about a week maybe 10 days after I had come out of the coma and I was starting to gain my strength and one of the nurses she came in to my room and she said to me that you've really got to start using your legs and start gaining some strength and I'm going to take you out of the bed and get you to walk around the room a little bit so she helped me out of the bed and we started to walk around the room and I was getting my strength back in my legs so I was holding on to the nurse with one arm and with the other arm I was holding onto the um onto the IV stand because I still had Ivy I still had the tubes going in and so I was walking around the room and then I said to her I'd like to go see myself in the mirror in the bathroom I haven't seen myself for ages so she led me to the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I was horrified by what I saw because I hadn't looked in the mirror for weeks and weeks and what I saw was somebody I was really really skinny Skin and Bones the hair had come out of my head in clumps and my my cheeks were completely sunken in it looked like my eyes were popping out of my head because my cheeks were so sunk in and I had these big bandages around my neck because of this open skin lesions and I just looked at myself and I told the nurse to leave me for a couple of minutes and I just started crying and I was crying because I felt that I had done this to myself I wasn't crying because I had lost my looks or anything I was crying because I really felt that I had done it to myself not because I thought it was my fault I had cancer anybody that has cancer I don't think it's your fault I don't think anyone did it deliberately but I felt I had done it to myself because I had spent my whole life just forsaking myself treating myself badly criticizing myself judging myself putting myself down making myself small and I'd spent a lifetime of doing that and I realized that that is what had drained me to the point that I got cancer and so I looked at myself in the mirror I looked at my face and I just put my hand up on the mirror and I said to myself that day that I will never ever let you down I will never treat you like a doormat I will never ever judge you I will never criticize you even if you fail even if everybody else does even if everyone else judges you I will never do that to you I will treat myself as my own best friend and from that day I've stuck to that commitment and this is what I invite all of you to do and this is what I've realized was my biggest lesson from having that near-death experience a lot of people write to me and they say things like if we love ourselves doesn't that make us really high maintenance and doesn't that make us only want to go shopping and go to the spa and things like that and um and and somebody actually said oh I must really love myself because I'm constantly doing my hair and my nails and going to the spa but my life's still not working for me by all means go shopping go to the spa eat chocolate do all that that's that's fine but doing that doesn't mean you love yourself I mean I I have a couple of those vices too I love shopping I love chocolate but doing those things doesn't mean you love yourself loving yourself really means being your best friend even when you've lost everything it really means that even if you failed even if you're completely downtrodden even if even if you're being criticized by everyone else it's the commitment that you will stick by you that you will still always be your own best friend that's what I've learned I told you that Wayne Dyer discovered my story and he sadly passed away just the just this last week which was very sad for me because he did launch my first book he had me on his TV show on his Public Television TV show um we have done numerous over the last three four years we have done so many speaking events together he was the one that pulled me on stage the first time in front of 3 000 people after after that little talk I did in front of 60 people it was several months later the next day I'd got this email and then it was um and then he contacted me and he's he flew me to Pasadena and he pulled me up on stage and there were 3 000 people in the audience and he said to me are you scared and I said of course I'm scared I've never spoken in front of 3 000 people before and he said why would you be scared you've been dead and back what's that you fear and I said public speaking is actually scarier than dying dying is easy but it was after speaking with him as well I started to realize this is what I was meant to do and so um and and so I started to tour and I started to speak and and it's funny because I had written back in 2006 on Jeffrey Long's website that I saw this vision and sure enough I realized all I had to do was just love myself be myself and I wouldn't have to figure it out because if I had to figure out how to get from where I was then to where I am now I wouldn't be able to do it I'm not that smart I've realized that it's actually a lot simpler than that and all we have to do is be ourselves and live our lives fearlessly and if and and on that note I'd like to bring this um bring this speech to an end so I invite you all to live your lives fearlessly and if all else fails eat chocolate and go shopping because that never fails all right foreign