A woman who needs no introduction, for her work speaks for herself. Caroline Myss is our generation’s peace maven. She has created a legacy that has transformed the way we think, we act and hopefully we be. Her enlightening magic transcribed into words, from “The Anatomy of the Spirit” to “Sacred Contracts” has opened up avenues never yet approached by anyone. In her interview, we dove deep into The Anatomy of Spirit, outlining the parts that resonated so clearly. Thank you Caroline, for sharing your deepest vulnerabilities with us and for giving us hope for a better world. 

I would love to know, before you were writing books, how did you get into this entire journey of self-discovery?

I just grew into it. It was just a natural progression. It’s in me to ask certain types of questions and to follow a certain way of being. Like an artist. An artist follows colours. My track of curiosity was human nature. Why are people like this? I had two areas of interest: God and war. I was fascinated by war and by military history. I was consumed by military history from the time I was a child. 

What did you realize about human nature?

Everybody’s at war. Do you know anyone who’s not at war? Whether they’re at war with themselves or war with a person, everyone goes to war. We never stop fighting. My dad was a marine. We were raised in a house with a great deal of honor and patriotism. There was an honor code. Always be faithful. Always be honorable. Never tell a lie. Never cheat. It was truly an honor code that my father and my mother lived by. He served in World War II. He was very impacted by the war. I wanted to know what happened to him during the war. It impacted him. I began to study war when I was nine years old.

I gave him a wallet when I was about eight or nine years old for Christmas one year. I watched him take out all the stuff from his wallet and put it into the wallet that I gave him. I saw him take out Japanese money. It had a hole in it and blood. He said, “this is from the first human being I knowingly killed.” He left the room, went to his room, got on his knees, and began praying. He prayed every year on Christmas for everyone he had shot. He never could forgive himself for that. That was the moment that I grabbed a book on war. 

What happened to my dad? That became my focus. There was something in me, I remember when I read Roman history and I thought, “that was so long ago.” Then I thought, “we’re no different now. We never stopped fighting. What is wrong with us?” You don’t get that answer from psychology. It’s a soul question. That’s a matter of understanding how someone sees the cosmos. How someone has values. Whether someone has faith. How someone understands the purpose of life. It’s not just about a bad childhood. It’s about a cosmic set of values and truth and whether you are obsessed with the love of power or the power of love. The transition to that, too, and making that transition because it’s the only transition that matters. After all of the years teaching, that’s the one right there. It’s the longest journey of life.

Do you think we’re on our way to peace?

I think it’s an individual journey for every single person. I think it’s the hardest journey in the world. The hardest thing for a human being is to empower another human being. They’re terrified of the power of another human being. They don’t get the law that a rising tide lives on ships. What you do for others, you’re doing for yourself. They don’t get it. They think, “if I give you more, I will have less.” I have seen parents not being able to empower their own kids. Here we are, forging our own intuitive nature, which gives us the capacity to sense the vulnerability in another human being. To sense whatever it is they need. To respond at a more intuitive level. To know that this person needs support. This person needs help at a more subtle level. The level of true suffering, which allows you to really utilize the gifts of your soul. To recognize how powerful kindness and compassion is and the healing power in saying, “you can do this. Let me prop you up a little bit.” How often someone would say nothing, or even worse, say something awful. They can’t bear that that person’s moment has come. That’s why I study war

Do you think we’ll ever have a world without war?

No. Never.

Why? Because it’s human nature?

In this playing field, life, we simply don’t get what this is about. This is not a shopping cart. We’re not down here to acquire goods and shove them away and die and bequeath them to someone else as a life well-lived. Look how big our shopping cart is. We’re not meant to be takers, we’re meant to be givers. We’re meant to leave this place better than we found it, not to damage it while we’re here. Why can’t we get that? It’s so simple. We’re primates. We still celebrate the fact that we’ve created weapons that can destroy the only place we can live. That’s how stupid we are. We are primates. We still think that weapons of killing are an accomplishment to be proud of. I am astounded by our stupidity. Teaching faith and teaching us to believe and to respect another’s faith is something we really can’t talk about. Do you think we’re going to have a peaceful world? Do you wonder why I study war? That’s all we promote here. We have leaders that are nothing but pathological liars. If people can see their bio-spiritual ecology, how they’re designed in the energetic system, they would realize that lying is the root of cancer. Lying is self-deception and self-betrayal. The soul requires integrity and honesty to thrive, and your souls is your battery.

Do you cross paths with people that feel the need to share their story with you?

I think they were serendipitous, but I also think that I have a natural magnet. I would rather hear someone’s story than tell my own. I would rather draw other people’s stories out of them than talk. I will talk in such ways to get someone to tell me their story. I have never once met someone who hasn’t fascinated me, even people whose lives I think are interestingly small. When I lived in New England, people have interestingly small lives. There are people like this one woman who was a secretary in the publishing company that I had for ten years Our publishing company was in New Hampshire, right on the Connecticut River. You can see the river and Vermont on the other side. We’re talking maybe two miles to drive down and cross the bridge. When she took the job, in her mind, it was working in another state. She had to think about that. Should she work in another state? It was a mile and a half, but for her, it was another state. As I got to know her, the biggest town near her in Vermont is Battleboro, a micro-city, and for her to go to Battleboro, she had to think about that. It was fourteen miles south. The closest town was Springfield. It was four miles. The big shop is there, and she was like, “when I have to go to buy groceries, I have to go to the big shop in Springfield.” She had never been on a plane. She fascinated me. How in the world can you live your life eating baloney and white bread all the time? But, she did. I remember thinking one day that I might envy something about your simplicity. I’ve never met someone who doesn’t fascinate me.

Actually, I remember I started crying when I heard the story in your book of David Chetlahe Paladin. What a story. And what you said about his spirit and the water—I felt him going in the water and getting his spirit. That is transformative. If every human could go through that…?

He had to face every single person in that concentration camp. They tormented him— his people said “We’re gonna let you drown unless you call your spirit back because no man can live without a spirit—go, go.” And when he told me this story, his cigarette in his mouth, and he said, “You know, I gotta tell you, that’s just the way my people do things.” I had this wonderful painting he gave me, hanging on my wall. He gave me a medicine stick that I keep forever and ever. It’s on my alter somewhere. He was a holy man. It was an honor to know him.

Can you tell us about the Anatomy of Spirit.

We don’t acknowledge our energetic anatomy system. We don’t live as though we have an energetic anatomy system. We don’t acknowledge the reality of the energetic world. Physicists talk about all of this being filled with black matter and we’re like, “okay.” It means nothing to us. People would say, “I just feel out of energy.” They don’t realize what they’ve just said. They’re just passing comment about their physical body. They don’t realize what they’ve actually said is that their entire energetic network is depleted. If they understood themselves as a Tesla, they would realize they have to plug themselves into something, like prayer or meditation, and reboot their battery. They don’t get it because they have no respect or reverence for their energetic nature. They don’t get that when they’re angry or when they’re in a power play with someone, that power play is actually an energetic haemorrhage. This is why you walk away from that person after something like that, you feel completely depleted. You have gutted that part of your body.

Can you go into details about what forms our spirit and energy?

Your physical senses, your eyes, your ears, touch, nose, taste, are the guardians of the physical world. Your energetic senses are on a different level. they’re an energetic sensory system. They’re attuned to an intuitive nature. They’re holograms. I want you to picture yourself in the centre of the globe. That is you. The latitude and longitude, I want you to picture those lines as your energy system. Where latitude and longitude cross, that’s your electric wires sparking. You are picking up data. It’s constantly processing all the energy from everybody and this is the globe in which you reside and all your energy is in here. It’s all your thoughts and your feelings and emotions. 

Energy is a useless word because it doesn’t describe what it is. It doesn’t reveal the content that it in fact includes every single thought, reaction, emotion, sentiment, resentment, idea, strategy. It’s all sparking in this orbit. Every passion, addiction, craving. It’s all sparking in this orbit. This is you. Everything you are and want, all your ambition that you never tell anyone about is in this orbit because it’s alive. It’s part of your life. It’s who you are. It’s all snap, crackling, and popping, and all actively attracting and acting on the law of magnetic attraction and the law of cause and effect. It’s all operating and placing phone calls to the energetic universe. When someone says that they create their own reality, they have no idea the field of chaos they’re in.

Are we co-creating with this energy?

Yes. People are so unaware. Think about it: eau de toilette, perfume, cologne. You have the same fragrance, but perfume is when you actually get a charge of all of this and get charge of yourself and are aware of what you’re generating. You have an awareness and have control so that when you are in a situation, other people’s comments mean nothing to you.

Do I co-create my reality? I influence what I live in and how it’s shared and how I then contribute to the whole. What my micro then becomes my macro. But, the macro influences the micro.

If we’re all connected, how can people do better in their micro so that their macro looks better?

It depends on if people want to do better. Do they? For every single person, it’s a different answer. It depends on what a person’s values are and what they want. It depends on what they believe in and what’s important to them. For a lot of people, it’s been my experience that one of the crises of our times is the lack of faith. I am not referring to faith in God. At the end of the day, I am. 

In the beginning, a faith crisis, while it ultimately is a faith crisis in God, where it expresses itself in the absence of faith a person has in themselves. That’s how a faith crisis expresses itself. People don’t have faith in their own word. They don’t keep their own word, not even to themselves. They don’t even get that they’re not keeping their word, or what a true betrayal that is to themselves and the consequence of that betrayal. They’ll say something like, “oh, I’ll exercise tomorrow.” Every part of that needs to rely on that personal system keeping its word knows you’re lying. If you lie to yourself, you will lie to everybody. If you lie and betray yourself, you now live as a liar and you will assume everybody is lying to you, which means that you have already poisoned every relationship you have. Liars can’t have a good relationship. You will be someone that says, “don’t you lie to me,” because you are a liar. 

You won’t be able to build a solid foundation on anything because you have no faith in yourself or in anybody else. You’ll betray everybody you’re with. You’ll gossip and you’ll break your word. You’re not acknowledging that you’re a liar and you cheat. You have no idea how dark your character is. In fact, you are a very dark and deceitful person, and you don’t own it. You wonder why your relationships are trash. You can’t trust because you have no faith. You wonder why nothing works. At the end of the day, this is a crisis of faith in God. You have no capacity to actually pray. You’ll go to a therapist to talk about what’s wrong and you’ll find someone to blame. 

It can’t be because of you, it has to be because of your childhood or because of this or that. What’s the playing field you want to live on in life? What’s the real reason for anxiety and depression? What’s the real reason for deep psychological suffering? It’s the absence of soul. The difference between therapy and prayer is that in prayer you are having a sacred dialogue saying “I really have a problem, I can’t tell the truth, and I have no faith in myself. You’ve got to get me out of this and help me.” Talking about it isn’t going to help you. You need some grace and courage. “I’m actually afraid of the truth. I’m terrified to live a more honourable life and come out of my alignment and partnership with darkness and into a partnership with the light. I’m terrified. You’ve got to help me out here.”Prayer makes you more conscious, not of all of that, but of your own actions. It makes you more mindful, and then the grace begins to come.

When you say faith, because you’ve said all religions, you don’t think it has to do with a particular religion?

To me, God is law. God is a universe of force, leave religion out of it. Religion is the politics of God. That’s just human beings. I only deal with God. I don’t deal with politics.

Is there any advice you would give this generation of women? Those who are thirty and under?

One of the biggest pitfalls is believing you were born for something special. That is a burden. Nobody was born for something special. What a burden. Then you think that everybody should recognize you. That’s like a grain of sand telling the ocean, “I am special. I won’t participate in being a grain of sand on the beach at all unless you, the ocean, recognize me as a grain of sand.” The truth is, you will get a lot more out of life if you humble up. You have got to realize that what’s special is life itself, not your life, but life. If you think you’re special, you’re going to think that everybody else should think that of you. That will be where you put your focus, and then you’re going to waste your life. Nobody was born to recognize your special-ness. Nobody. That is for sure.

Do you think that it should be more about the collective and people coming together instead of them thinking they’re their own special person?

I think that it should be about realizing that it’s a privilege to be alive now. This is the greatest era of transformation in the history of humanity. Everybody has a unique grace that they need to awaken in themselves. That journey of awakening your grace requires that you get through the anguish of battling what you think you want, and let your soul tell you what you really do need to do. It’s more important to ask yourself, “what was I born to give?” Instead of, “what was I born to take?” Every time you feel driven by jealousy or fear, that’s when you should hit the stop button and realize that the worst of you is driving you, not the best of you. Stay in prayer, even if every day is “hover over me, God. Download me with some badass grace so I don’t screw anything up.” That’s a good enough prayer.

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Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author and internationally renowned speaker in the fields of human consciousness, spirituality and mysticism, health, energy medicine, and the science of medical intuition. Caroline established her own educational institute in 2003, CMED (Caroline Myss Education), which offers a diverse array of programs devoted to personal development and draws students from all over the world. In addition to hosting a weekly radio show on the Hay House network, Caroline maintains a rigorous international workshop and lecture schedule. carolinemyss.com