By Caroline Myss
Reviewed by Lorrie Kazan (Review published in LA Spirit and Intuitive connections: 9/07)
This is a powerful 5-CD collection that takes on and speaks cogently about issues that healers face.
Dr. Myss’ penetrating intellect, as well as her work as an intuitive, led her to delve into and write about questions that troubled her. For instance, Why People Don’t Heal, which then became one of her best selling books.
She is a sought after and somewhat controversial speaker. In researching her biography, I didn’t find much that wasn’t submitted by Dr. Myss or Harvard-trained neurologist, Dr. Norm Shealy, with whom she worked.
Myss mentions experiences in her life that the listener cannot document or delve. For example, when she discusses the difference between the psychic wound of the healer, and the normal heartache of earth school, she alludes to having suffered that deep psychic wound.
She was so ill and bereft at one time that she had to let her former world dissolve. This is the nature of the psychic wound as she describes it; the world behind the healer’s eyes has to become more compelling than the outer world and any attachments to it.
Otherwise, the healer will compromise her integrity and cross everyone’s boundaries, including her own. One gets the feeling that Myss embodies the warrior archetype and does not easily compromise.
Many healers are more aligned with the orphan archetype, which Myss would probably call the victim. Tinkerbell is a tag she gives the highly sensitive person. For her, sensitivity is a choice and she chooses not to have it.
We may also wonder if she is also defended against it. As in most of her work, she comes across as arrogant and scolding, leaving the listener with some excellent information but also feeling slapped around.
You can be a flawed person, she tells us, and still be fully empowered as a healer. “I specialize in it,” she says in one of the few sentences that reveals her humanity.
She jabs at the pretentious new ager as a lost soul who is unaware of the need to confront the ego and its private agendas. This tone becomes irksome in its presumption that the listener is the blind, hungry ghost. However, her cautions are valid and we can use them to address this shadow part of ourselves.
Myss smartly articulates the issues that face the consciousness community.
And she warns us about traps people fall into.
For example, people often assume that the healer should have all the answers and should be able not only to heal but in fact cure each malady.
Of course, this edges out the grace of God, the energy of which the healer is merely a vessel. And we also know that one can be healed without being cured.
One of her salient points that we don’t often hear: Illness can be a divine appointment to experience a particular consciousness, and to interact with the healing archetype. It’s not necessarily a result of doing something wrong.
She’s mad as hell at this myth that you have to be a vegetarian to be intuitive, or that all illness could be prevented if you were only eating organically enough.
Another myth is to assume that healers only work in the healing arts. In fact, if you’re called to healing, you will transform the energy wherever you are, whether that be in a bank or the local Taco Bell.
She cites Eleanor Roosevelt as someone whose courage in leadership left a legacy that lasted long past her time.
As a skeptical intuitive, I find Myss’information clear, believable and worth exploring. It supports much of what I’ve come to on my own, although I do not agree with all of it.
She emphasized self-esteem in a way I had not heard before. She presents self-esteem as a higher goal for the healer than love. If you do not get to love through self-esteem, i.e., self love, then you cannot authentically love another or be a clear channel for them.
Without self-esteem, you will compromise the incredible power you could be in order to fulfill your private agendas that stem more from the child archetype. Therefore, we need to know ourselves and assess our own motivations.
Know what you can and cannot do, when to say no even if it means you’ll displease someone. Guard your own energy and don’t sell it cheaply.
She sees self esteem as earned, when you prove to yourself that no matter what happens you will find a way to survive. If that’s true, then concentration camp victims should have a high dose of self-esteem.
If she were teaching a course on intuition, she’d have everyone write a list of all the things they “should” do and weren’t doing. Those shoulds, she said, are the nudges of intuition. And if you don’t listen to your own inner promptings, why should anyone listen to you?
I would also question whether “shoulds” are the true voice of intuition as opposed to the super ego. (See a synopsis of a lecture by Jungian analyst Jan Bauer, www.lorriekazan.blogspot.com)
Myss assumes that the listener is not eating or exercising properly and is countering an inner knowing.
Sounds True
Click here for Caroline Myss’ Essential Guide for Healers
Click here for Notes from the Essential Guide for Healers
