Authors

Talking with Caroline Myss

The nature of Caroline Myss’s healingwork seems to lend itself effortlessly to the audio format. In fact, compared to printed text, the author of ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT and WHY PEOPLE DON’T HEAL AND HOW THEY CAN much prefers the lecture-oriented performance of her writing, calling spoken language her “natural state” with its impromptu analogies and metaphors. “Audio is a wonderful tool,” she says. “My adoration for the writing process cannot begin to be expressed. It’s soothing, meditational. But when it comes to communicating with the most spark, there’s nothing like audio.”

It all started in 1978. Myss was sent as a journalist to cover a recovery workshop seminar held by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross for adult abuse victims. “I went there to expose her,” Myss recalls. Kübler-Ross was gaining press because of her controversial theory that human beings could be healed through emotion and not purely by scientific means. Myss wasn’t at all convinced. But something happened to Caroline Myss that day. “I’d never been to a workshop like this before. I’d never been in a room with so much abuse,” she marvels.

In the group was a woman who had been abused and who had also recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Dr. Kübler-Ross asked this woman, “Has anyone loved you?”

The woman said, matter-of-factly, “No.”

“Has anyone held you?” asked Kübler-Ross.

After a long silence, the woman answered, “Not that I remember.”

The weight of that statement and its visible effect on the woman hit Myss deeply. “Something in me cracked,” says Myss. “I thought, I have got to understand how this works.”

During the next twenty years, Dr. Caroline Myss made her life’s focus the practice of helping others realize the healing power of what she calls the energetic system of the human body. With her bestselling audio recordings, Myss guides listeners to a better awareness of their innate healing power with the implementation of ancient chakra principles and divine spiritual con-nection. Myss and her newest release, SPIRITUAL POWER, SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, were featured for a full hour on Oprah Winfrey’s television program, and copies of the audio were distributed to each of the audience members.

“We are energetic people,” Myss maintains. “Look at our language: We have ‘broken hearts,’ or ‘lost energy.’” It is this energy that Myss guides people to tap into within themselves and channel toward their own healing power. “There’s nothing new I’m teaching; it’s already there inside you.”—Rachel Astarte Piccione

FEB/MAR 99

Photo © Paul Elledge