ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT

THE SEVEN STAGES OF POWER AND HEALING

CAROLINE MYSS, PH.D.

THREE RIVERS PRESS                1996

PART 1

About the author

Caroline Myss, Ph.D., is an internationally sought-after speaker on spirituality and personal power. She is widely recognized for her work in teaching intuitive diagnosis and is a pioneer in the field of energy medicine. She lives in Chicago.

Foreword by C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D.

On rare occasions, you may meet a unique person who dramatically alters your perceptions of the world and of yourself. You are just about to meet just such an extraordinary individual. Author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss will intrigue, provoke, and inspire you with her views on spirituality and your personal responsibility for your own health. Some aspects of Caroline’s work will seem so commonsensical to you that you will wonder why you hadn’t thought of them that way before. Other ideas of hers will push your emotional and psychological buttons and cause you to reevaluate your spiritual path.

I was introduced to Caroline’s philosophy a dozen years ago. Her simple, powerful message is that each of us is born with an inherent spiritual task, a sacred contract to learn to use our personal power responsibly, wisely, and lovingly.

• There have been, throughout the ages, talented intuitives and mystics who have sensed the power centers of the human body. Alice Bailey, Charles W. Leadbetter, and Rudolf  Steiner have all written in this field.

The single most important question that people have asked throughout history has been “What is my purpose in life?” Caroline answers this question simply and profoundly. One’s purpose is to live in a manner that is consistent with one’s spiritual ideals, to live the Golden Rule every moment of one’s life, and to live every thought as a sacred prayer. It is simple – but far from easy!

• Quantum physicists have confirmed the reality of the basic vibratory essence of life, which is what intuitives sense.

Although scientific instruments cannot yet evaluate any one person’s specific frequency or the blocks to the flow of such energy, two basic facts cannot be denied. First, life energy is not static; it is kinetic; it moves around. And second, talented intuitives such as Caroline can evaluate it, even though neither the human mind nor the energy system can yet be accurately physically measured.

• Caroline tunes in to the subtle energy of our systems and reads the language of our electromagnetic being.

In this book you will find detailed information on the seven power centers of your body. These centers are critical regulators of the flow of life energy. They represent the major biological batteries of your emotional biography. “Your biography becomes your biology” – if you learn nothing else from this work, this fact alone will be useful to you. You will also learn how to avoid being sapped or zapped by your own attachments or by other people’s negative energy; how to secure your sense of self and honor so that your personal power base is not eroded by the false symbols of power – money, sex, and external authority; and how to develop your own intuitive abilities.

• The Anatomy of the Spirit presents an exciting new ecumenical way to understand the seven energy centers of the body. It integrates Judaic, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist concepts of power into seven universal spiritual truths.
• You will be transformed forever by the power of this merging of the metaphysical meaning of the Christian sacraments, the Kabbalah, and the chakras.
• Knowledge is power, and the knowledge presented in this book is the key to personal power.

This book presents the essence of alternative medicine, with a clarity that will inspire you to live your spiritual ideals and that will awaken you to the miracles of self-healing. I am delighted to have been present during the gestation of this seminal work. My life has been enriched by this knowledge beyond my dreams. May yours be equally graced by Caroline’s wisdom.

Preface: Becoming Medically Intuitive

In the autumn of 1982, after ending my career as a newspaper journalist and obtaining a master’s degree in theology, I joined forces with two partners to start a book publishing company called Stillpoint. We published books about healing methods that were alternatives to establishment medicine. Despite my business interest in alternative therapies, however, I wasn’t the least bit interested in becoming personally involved in them. I had no desire to meet any healers myself. I refused to meditate. I developed an absolute aversion to wind chimes, New Age music, and conversations on the benefits of organic gardening. I smoked while drinking coffee by the gallon, still fashioning myself after an image of a hard-boiled newspaper reporter. I was not at all primed for a mystical experience.

• Nevertheless, that same autumn, I gradually recognized that my perceptual abilities had expanded considerably.
• By the spring of 1983 I was doing readings for people who were in health crises and life crises of various kinds, from depression to cancer.
• I felt as if I were suddenly responsible for explaining the will of God to dozens of sad, frightened people, without any training.
• Having grown up a Catholic and studied theology, I was keenly aware that transpersonal abilities lead one inevitably to the monastery – or to the madhouse.
• Deep in my soul, I knew that I was connecting with something that was essentially sacred, and that knowledge was splitting me in two. No matter how I envisioned my future I felt I was headed for misery.
• I was fascinated by my newfound perceptual ability, nonetheless, and was compelled to keep on evaluating people’s health.
• I began to realize something I had never been taught in school: that our spirit is very much a part of our daily lives; it embodies our thoughts and emotions, and it records every one of them, from the most mundane to the visionary.
• I saw that our spirit participates in every second of our lives. It is the conscious force that is life itself.
• I was in the middle of a session with a woman who had cancer. I dreaded telling her that the cancer had spread throughout her body. She asked, “Caroline, I know I have a serious cancer. Can’t you tell me why this is happening to me?”
• Suddenly I was flushed with an energy I had never had before. A voice spoke through me to this woman. “Let me walk you back through your life and through each of the relationships of your life,” it said.
• “Let me walk with you through all the fears you’ve had, and let me show you how those fears controlled you for so long that the energy of life could no longer nurture you.”
• This “presence” escorted this woman through every detail of her life, and I mean every detail.
• This “presence” left the impression that every second of our lives – and every mental, emotional, creative, physical, and even resting activity with which we fill those seconds – is somehow known and recorded.
• Every judgment we make is noted. Every attitude we hold is a source of positive or negative power for which we are accountable.
• I was unprepared for this sacred spectacle in which every second of life is lovingly held to be of great value.
• All she said was, “Thank you so much. I can live with everything now.” She paused, then continued, “Even my death doesn’t scare me. Everything is just fine.”

Since that autumn day in 1983, I have worked wholeheartedly as a medical intuitive. This means that I use my intuitive ability to help people understand the emotional, psychological, and spiritual energy that lies at the root of their illness, dis-ease, or life crisis. I can sense the type of illness that has developed, often before the individual is even aware of having an illness at all. The people I work with usually are aware, however, that their lives are not in balance and that something is wrong.

• What’s unusual about my intuition is that I can evaluate people with whom I’ve had no contact whatsoever. The more I have used my intuition, the more accurate it has become.
• It was not easy, even after pledging to cooperate with it, to perfect my intuitions. I had no models and no teacher, although eventually I had the support and guidance of medical colleagues.
• Now after fourteen years of continuous work, the skill feels like a sixth sense to me.
• This means to me that it’s time for me to teach others about the language of energy and medical intuition.
• My particular insights have shown me that emotional and spiritual  stresses or dis-eases are the root causes of all physical illnesses.
• Certain emotional and spiritual crises correspond quite specifically to problems in certain parts of the body.
• The more I studied the human energy system, the more I realized that very little is created “randomly” in our bodies or, for that matter, in our lives.

Being medically intuitive has helped me learn not only about the energy causes of disease but about the challenges we face in healing ourselves. Of great significance to me was the realization that “healing” does not always mean that the physical body recovers from an illness. Healing can also mean that one’s spirit has released long-held fears and negative thoughts toward oneself or others. This kind of spiritual release and healing can occur even though one’s body may be dying physically.

Learning the language of the human energy system is a means to self-understanding, a way through your spiritual challenges. By studying energy anatomy, you will identify the patterns of your life and the deep interworkings of your mind, body, and spirit. This self-knowledge can bring you pleasure and peace of mind and lead to emotional and physical healing, along the way.

This introduction to medical intuition is the summation of my fourteen years of research into anatomy and intuition, body and mind, spirit and power. In its pages I teach you the language of energy with which I work. By gaining a fluent knowledge of energy anatomy, you will also become aware of your body as the manifestation of your own spirit. You will be able to read your own body like a scripture. Understanding the language of energy enables you to see your own spirit in your body and to understand what generates it and makes it – and you – strong. The language of energy will give you a new view of your personal power. You will also learn what weakens your spirit and personal power so that you can stop further loss of energy. Using the language of energy and understanding the human energy system will help you have clearer intuitive impressions by giving you body-based, concrete referents that take the edge off the sensation that you are looking blindly into empty air for information.

In this book, I draw on the deep, abiding, ancient wisdom of several spiritual traditions – the Hindu Chakras, the Christian sacraments, and the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life – to present a new view of how your body and spirit work together.

• Please note that I have deliberately not included the rich teachings of Islam, not because I do not honor its truths, but because I have not lived with the tradition as I have with Judeo-Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist teachings.
• I believe that we are meant to understand our body-minds as individual spiritual powers expressive of a greater Divine energy.
• We are meant to discover both our personal power and our shared purpose for being alive within a spiritual context.
• The mind-body focus of this book is infused with the spiritual language of symbolic sight. Symbolic sight is a way of seeing and understanding yourself, other people, and life events in terms of universal archetypal patterns.
• Developing symbolic sight will enhance your intuitive ability because it will teach you a healthy objectivity that brings out the symbolic meaning of events, people, and challenges, most especially perhaps the painful challenge of illness.
• Symbolic sight lets you see into your spirit and your limitless potential for healing and wholeness.

• The people who attend my lectures and workshops are diverse, yet they all share in common a desire to understand the power of their spirits. They want to develop an internal clarity, their own intuitive voice.
• The physicians who fill my workshops share with me their frustrations that when they get a hunch that an emotional or even spiritual cause underlies a patient’s illness, they are not at liberty to make a spiritual diagnosis because spiritual ideas have no authority within a conventional science. The desire for a spiritual context and interpretation of life is universal.
• I believe that the language of energy and the practice of symbolic sight can help bridge the gap between conventional medical and spiritual views of health and healing.
• When I first began intuiting the presence of illness, I was frightened and disturbed by my own lack of medical and spiritual context.
• In 1984, however, I met C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D. and began intensive training with him in the physical anatomy of the human body.
• By speaking to and through Norm to patients about their lives and illness, I was able to refine my understanding of the impressions I received. This gave me the comfort zone I needed to permit my skill to mature.
• Through my years working with Norm, I learned that my skill is of most value in the stages before a physical illness actually develops.
• Before the body produces a physical illness, energy indicators, such as prolonged lethargy and depression, tell us we are losing our vitality.
• Frequently medical tests indicate that nothing is wrong because they cannot identify anything happening at the physical level.

New, perplexing diseases that do not respond to conventional medical treatment are emerging continually. Some of them, like AIDS, can be diagnosed through conventional medical methodology, while others seem to develop as a result of the high-voltage pace of our lives and our constant exposure to electromagnetic energy from computers, satellite dishes, cellular phones, and the many other devices with which we are overloading our environment. Illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome and environmental disorders, at present, are “unofficial” illnesses; according to conventional medical standards, they lack an identifiable microbial cause. Yet they are most certainly official illnesses within the energy definition of a health dysfunction, because their symptoms indicate that the patient is experiencing a loss of power in the energy field.

Medical intuition can help physicians who understand the human body to be both a physical system and an energy system, who have a spiritual context for the human experience, to identify the energy state of a physical illness and treat the underlying cause as well as the symptoms. Treatment in the energy field can include an array of therapies, such as psychological counseling, acupuncture, massage, and homeopathy. The essential ingredient for energy healing remains, however, the active involvement of the patient. No matter how urgently a medical intuitive warns of the probability of an illness, warnings do not heal. Action does.

• It is only through years of practice that you will fully develop your own intuitions.
• Anyone can benefit from following the teachings in this book and improve one’s intuitive clarity, but because a residency program is so essential to developing intuition fully, in the near future Norm and I intend to help medically intuitive students do their residency programs at holistic health centers throughout the country.
• As Larry Dossey, M.D. writes in Meaning and Medicine, we need to practice “Era III Medicine” – therapies that combine spiritual and physical, holistic and allopathic approaches to physical and emotional healing.
• I cannot help feeling that medical intuitives will eventually become essential members of health care teams, both in this country and around the world.
• Through this book I hope that you will learn to think of yourself in the language of energy as vividly as you now see your physical body, and that you will begin to care for your spirit as consciously as you now care for your physical body.

 

Introduction: A Brief Personal History