Myss, Caroline 1953(?)–

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Mace"; born c. 1953. Education: Received B.A., 1974, and M.A., 1976; Greenwich University, Hawaii, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Publisher, journalist, medical intuitive, writer, lecturer, and trainer. Worked as a journalist, 1974; Stillpoint Publishing, Inc., Walpole, NH, cofounder, 1983, editorial department head, 1983–90; American Holistic Medical Association, Albuquerque, NM, founder (with C. Norman Shealy), 1984; Professional Intuitive Training, founder and developer (with C. Norman Shealy), 1992–2004; Institute for the Science of Medical Intuition, cofounder (with C. Norman Shealy), 1996; CMED Institute (Caroline Myss Education, an educational institute), founder, 2003; hosted television show on Oxygen network 2003–c.2004. Lecturer at colleges, including San Francisco State University, Southern Connecticut University, University of Massachusetts, Brandeis University, Regent's College, Cambridge University, and Oxford University; appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. State of the World Forum, member of board, 1999–2004.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(With C. Norman Shealy) AIDS: Passageway to Transformation, Stillpoint (Walpole, NH), 1987.

(With C. Norman Shealy) Creation of Health: The Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Responses that Promote Health and Healing, Stillpoint (Walpole, NH), 1993.

Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, Harmony (New York, NY), 1996.

Why People Don't Heal and How They Can, Harmony (New York, NY), 1997.

(Author of foreword) Karen Grace Kassy, Health Intuition: A Simple Guide to Greater Well-Being, Hazelden Press (Center City, MN), 2000.

Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, Harmony (New York, NY), 2001.

Caroline Myss's Journal of Inner Dialogue: Working with Your Chakras, Archetypes, and Sacred Contracts, Hay House (Carlsbad, CA), 2003.

Channeling Grace: Daily Acts of Service, Hay House (Carlsbad, CA), 2004.

Invisible Acts of Power: Personal Choices that Create Miracles, Free Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Autobiography of George Washington: With Edith Ellis as Scribe, CMED Book Place (Oak Park, IL), 2005.

(Author of foreword) C. Norman Shealy, Life beyond 100: Secrets of the Fountain of Youth, Tarcher Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Also writer and producer of audio books and videos, including Energy Anatomy (six cassettes), Sounds True (Louisville, CO), 1996; Spiritual Madness, Barnes & Noble/Supermart, 1997; Healing with Spirit, Hay House (Carlsbad, CA), 1997; Three Levels of Power and How to Use Them, Sounds True (Louisville, CO), 1998; Spiritual Power, Spiritual Practice, Sounds True (Louisville, CO), 1998; A Passion for Life, Simon & Schuster Audio (New York, NY), 2002; Your Primal Nature: Connecting with the Power of the Earth, Sounds True (Louisville, CO), 2003; and Intuitive Power, Hay House Audio (Carlsbad, CA), 2004.

Some of the author's works have been translated into eighteen languages.

ADAPTATIONS: Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, was adapted for audio cassette, Sounds True, 1996; Why People Don't Heal and How They Can was adapted for audio cassette, Sounds True, 1997.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Soul's Agenda and a media project on the United States' mystical history.

SIDELIGHTS: Caroline Myss is a medical intuitive who was described by a critic in Publishers Weekly as "one of the hottest new voices in the alternative health/spirituality scene." A medical intuitive has the ability to evaluate the quality of a person's health from a distance—even from information received on the telephone. Given only the person's name, age, and permission, Myss is able to get impressions of his or her health, as she explained in an interview published in Yoga Journal, "as if I were reading a series of data banks in the body."

Myss had this ability as a child, but she says she was a "loose cannon" then, and the gift went dormant when she was fifteen. She became a journalist, then studied theology in graduate school and developed traditional ambitions. Her education "grounded" her. At age twenty-nine, working at a New Hampshire publishing house she had co-founded, her medical clairvoyance returned and became focused; she not only could tell whether a person was ill but also could feel the location and quality of the illness. According to the interview in Yoga Journal, shortly thereafter, she met C. Norman Shealy, a Missouri-based Harvard-trained neurosurgeon who was studying medical intuitives. They established a partnership; he would call her in New Hampshire with a patient's name, age, and permission. In addition to impressions about the nature of the person's illness, she soon found she could read the contributory emotional factors as well. Myss never met Shealy's patients, and he never told her whether her intuitive diagnoses matched his medical ones—but over time, his records demonstrated that Myss was correct ninety-three percent of the time.

In 1987, Myss and Shealy published AIDS: Passageway to Transformation, the story of a young man who she had realized was HIV-positive. They tailored a healing program for the patient involving behavioral changes and psychotherapy; within six weeks, the patient tested negative, as he still did ten years later. Myss and Shealy began offering workshops on "the science of intuition," according to the interview in Yoga Journal. In The Creation of Health: The Emotional, Psychological, and Spiritual Responses that Promote Health and Healing, Myss and Shealy offer what the same article described as "a roadmap of how illness corresponds to negative emotions stored in the body's seven energy centers," known in yoga terminology as "chakras." Based on more than fifty case studies, The Creation of Health is, Myss said in an interview published on the HealthWorld Online Web site, "a textbook … that first of all walks you through the reasons why your body loses power, and then what stress causes what illness." The book's index provides easy access to discussions of more than 200 specific illnesses.

Myss gave up her publishing career in 1988, and began to divide her time between giving personal health evaluations as a medical intuitive, and giving workshops with Shealy. She stopped working as a medical intuitive in 1992 in favor of teaching people how to maintain their own health, and began work on her Ph.D. in "intuition and energy medicine," she explained in the interview in Yoga Journal.

In 1996, she published Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, based in part on her doctoral research. Anatomy of the Spirit links three traditions—the seven chakras (Hindu), the seven sacraments (Christian), and the Kabbalah's Tree of Life (Jewish)—to help people develop spiritual maturity, personal power, and their own latent powers of intuition. Most of the book is an extended discussion of the relationships between the seven chakras and health. As she told the interviewer for Yoga Journal, "your biography is your biology." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly felt that the real-life case studies provided in the book were helpful and added: "There's wisdom here, in words that eschew New Age jargon and make the otherwise esoteric material accessible to general readership."

Why People Don't Heal and How They Can came from Myss's observation that after years of New Age enthusiasm about people taking responsibility for their illnesses, they still do not get well. In 1988, as reported on the Laura Lee Show Web site, she introduced a friend to two men, and "within two minutes, my friend managed to let these men know that she was an incest survivor"—information that had nothing to do with the subjects under discussion. Myss says: "In a flash I realized that she was using her wounds as leverage … [and that] she defined herself by a negative experience." Myss calls this approach to life "woundology." She says: "I saw that, rather than working to get beyond their wounds, people were using them as social currency."

Embracing woundology frequently leads to illness. Myss maintains that we all are given a finite amount of energy for our physical bodies, our minds, and our emotions. "When we choose to siphon off some of this energy to keep negative events in our histories alive, we are robbing that energy from our cell tissue, making ourselves vulnerable to the development of disease," she stated in an article posted on the Laura Lee Show Web site. Often, the first step to healing is to retrieve one's energy from the places in which it has gotten stuck—as Myss puts it, "calling one's spirit back." Why People Don't Heal shows how to read one's energy patterns and body, and how to shift one's consciousness. However, she cautioned in a piece published on the Laura Lee Show Web site: "The greatest illusion of the New Age is that awareness alone heals. Believe me, awareness by itself does nothing!"

Among other things, moving beyond woundology requires a person to embrace forgiveness. If we stop thinking of ourselves as victims, Myss told the correspondent with Yoga Journal, we'll learn that it's "okay to express healthy self-esteem…. We've got to realize that feeling healthy includes feeling good about ourselves."

In Myss's next major book, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, she moves into another way of looking at the human spirit and its possibilities through her interest in symbology and archetypes. She believes that the human soul agrees to certain experiences before birth and that there are a number of symbolic archetypes that help define and control the life experiences of that soul. Myss offers her method to unlock readers' spiritual potential and understand why they were put on Earth so as to become in touch with their true purpose. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer compared her method to I Ching and called her work an "ingenious system" which is "a means to see ourselves in a greater light."

Myss describes another method of spiritual development in Invisible Acts of Power: Personal Choices that Create Miracles. Using personal stories of aid given to others that were sent to her from readers worldwide, Myss defines seven steps to growing spiritually, including financial support, wisdom, and self-esteem. These steps are linked to the seven chakras in the body. Myss also believes acts of kindness create a tremendous amount of energy and grace that contribute to this growth. A critic in Publishers Weekly found that Invisible Acts of Power holds a "universal, timely message that can be enjoyed and utilized by people everywhere."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Publishers Weekly, September 9, 1996, review of Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing, p. 72; December 3, 2001, review of Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, p. 52; August 30, 2004, review of Invisible Acts of Power: Personal Choices that Create Miracles, p. 51.

Yoga Journal, September-October 1996, interview with Caroline Myss.

ONLINE

Caroline Myss Home Page, http://www.myss.com (December 12, 2005), biography of Caroline Myss.

HealthWorld Online, http://www.healthy.net/ (January 2, 2006), Russell E. DiCarlo, "Intuitively Perceiving the Human Energy Field," interview with Caroline Myss.

Laura Lee Show Web site, http://www.lauralee.com/ (January 2, 2006), "Why People Don't Heal."

Share Guide, http://www.shareguide.com/ (January 2, 2006), Dennis Hughes, interview with Caroline Myss.