Caroline Myss
Medical intuitive and mystic Caroline Myss has more than twenty-seven years of experience as a guide and teacher who specializes in assisting people to understand the multitude of reasons why they develop an illness: physical, emotional and psychological. Myss is the author of the bestsellers: Anatomy of the Spirit, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, Sacred Contacts and Entering the Castle. Her upcoming book, Beyond Reason: Healing Through Mystical Wisdom and Common Sense, will be published in October, 2009.
Myss states that the Age of Reason we were all born into has come to a close, and now is the time we all need to access mystical wisdom to assess how we can heal individually and as a society. When she talks, she speaks in exclamation points, with an emphatic
desire to facilitate healing and change through her words.
FMT: What do you think is the most important thing we can do to start to mend the dysfunctional relationships we have with each other and the environment?
CM: Before we even get any further, we need to establish how serious this crisis is. We’re a long way from mending the environmental crisis. We haven’t even begun to wake up to the seriousness of it or the interconnected nature of the seriousness of it. We haven’t even established an all-inclusive definition of environment that effectively serves the real meaning of this term. Not until we do that are we in a position to create a genuinely effective strategy for confronting the pressing environmental crises, most of which are not even “real” for people. The probability of climate change or global water shortages and what that portends, such as environmental refugees fleeing their countries in search of other countries that have water, is incomprehensible. And yet, the likelihood of such a crisis is very real sometime in the next ten years. It’s just like the global financial meltdown we are now experiencing. Because a massive financial collapse never happened before, we believed it could not happen at all. Obviously such massive crises can happen and when they do, they can happen in the blink of an eye. We are not a species known for heeding the warnings of prophets, and environmental prophets have been warning us for decades now that the environment is in a catastrophic situation.
We have an incredibly dysfunctional definition of environment. We still see ourselves as fundamentally separated from the environment. We still think of the environment as the outside world, as nature, as we exist apart from this entity called nature. So long as we are in a house, for example, we think we are not in nature’s environment, as if the house we are in does not exist within nature’s environment and is not fed by nature’s water supply and nature’s energy. When we speak about environment now, we have to include within that context, not just the organic definition of environment, but the interconnectedness of all that sustains our lives, including our jobs and the politics of this global village.
We’ve relied upon three tools for the last several centuries: money, law and war. And all three are completely dysfunctional when it comes to dealing with our current crisis. We can’t bomb our way out of the melting icecaps. We can’t run money off these magic machines or borrow money from China and go to the North Pole and say “now stop melting” then pour billions of dollars into the ice caps.
The whole approach is preposterous. From a much larger context, we’ve come to the end of the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment – and the end of an epoch in terms of our way of life. We are the last of the fossil fuel generation. The problem that is facing us is that we are at an axial shift in the evolution of life itself and it’s so big that we can’t even language it. This is the end of a whole way of doing things, which is why we’re watching the grand meltdown of every system we’ve ever relied upon, from money to war to weapons to systems of problem solving, and thus we lack the means to maneuver through any of this because we have never before confronted a global crisis of this magnitude.
We actually believe we can reason our way through this when in fact you can’t reason your way through a crisis. A crisis is among the most unreasonable of adversaries you will ever confront. And the fact is we see ourselves as a reasonable species when we’re not. We have reached the end of the line of the tools of reason and we have to transcend every part of ourselves. We think, for example, that blame is a method of problem solving or that criticizing the opposition actually helps resolve the dilemmas at hand. As I watch the Republicans attack the Obama White House, I marvel at their strategies, all aimed at hoping Obama’s solutions fail, which means their own country continues to decline, in order that they regain their positions of power in the Senate and House. Instead of rallying behind the White House and offering the best of their counsel, they sabotage through endless useless opinions and do nothing else, noting, by the way, that they were all silent under the Bush administration for fear of Republican reprisals. So much for reason and the power of conscience, never mind consciousness.
FMT: We have to shift everything.
CM: We do have to recognize that all of the indulgent ways we have lived are essentially over. We can’t just pull out the credit card and then file bankruptcy. The way we have lived and the assumptions that we built on that way of life on are dysfunctional. We now must create a new concept of the “American Dream” that is not just based upon economics but upon its philosophical roots, which is the privilege of freedom, creative rights and human dignity. We have to turn to a different way of thinking, not looking for roads that were familiar before but are no longer there because the floods took them away. How can we find roads in the forest that we still live in but walk them anew?
We have to build a society based on what we need to become, an energy-based society with energy technology. We are much closer to this template of energetic consciousness than you might think. Consider, for example, that when you go to the doctor and the doctor says “I have some medicine for your kidney because your kidney is infected, but it’s terrible for your liver. How do you feel about that?” You would likely hit the pause button and think, “I don’t think my liver is going to like this very much.” You automatically evaluate your whole body system when considering a medical treatment because you have a more integrated model of health in your consciousness, one that reflects an awareness of the connection between your energetic systems and your physical body. That is just one indication of how much we have already become absorbed into the Age of Energy, so to speak.
If you have been a student of consciousness at all, you are now resonating to a mystical law that says all is one. You are now resonating to a template that is fundamentally wholistic as opposed to fragmented and it constantly alerts you in subtle ways to identify when, how and in which situations you end up feeling as if you have been fragmented. Fragmented is a term that now converts to what it means to be traumatized at a psychic level. The template of wholism has been downloaded into every human being and into the global village where all of the nations function on a homeopathic body politic. Just like no one organ of your body can be treated to the detriment of another organ in your body, much less the rest of your body, that same rule applies to the global village of nations: No one nation has the right to control this entire body politic any longer if the entire global community is to sustain health.
The fact is that no one nation, none of us, is going to face the transition to global oneness without a fight. No one person and no one nation acquiesces power gracefully. That’s not the way of human nature. What we are now living through is the global equivalent to an economic nuclear war. This is like a substitute bomb that got dropped on us. This is the war that, thank you God, did not happen via weapons of mass destruction. This is the catastrophe that had to happen to humble humanity in order to bring leaders to the economic table for a new kind of dialog, because humanity never goes to the next step without a fight. I’d much rather we all face this than a hellacious nuclear war, because none of us can afford to nuke each other anymore. I bow to this crisis. It had to be a crisis that we are all in together. It will make us all equally mindful. It will not make us all equally good. Let us be completely realistic about this. Goodness is not born of this; that comes from an individual choice. But need is definitely born of this.
FMT: It seems to be more important to talk about moving forward than how it happened since there are so many ways that we got here.
CM: Oh no, we must talk about how this happened and talk about it again and again and again. We must learn from the past. We must study this story again and again and teach the pathway that led to these events. What? Move forward without studying the many stages of the dismantling of a planetary system of power??? Absolutely not. Never. There are so many directions from which we could discuss this crisis and how it happened.
For one thing, we have the obvious reason: We deregulated greed. Then we have reasons with a more mystical twist: We took the Ten Commandments out of the courtroom, we said, “Get them out of here, we don’t want to be directly mindful of any consequences of our actions tied to the Sacred.” There is a sacred consequence to human action. When Moses brought down the Ten Commandments, he brought down the merger of Heaven and Earth and the sacred consequence to human behavior. Call it religion, what you will, but there was an archetypal move on the chessboard of human evolution with the advent of the Ten Commandments that advanced the understanding of consequence to cosmic proportions. In a sense, we dismantled our relationship with that one critical covenant during these past fifteen years through our constant removal of the language of the soul – which includes the language of conscience – from our schools as well as our courtrooms, allowing human beings to become dishonorable right in the core of our courts. And become dishonorable we did.
Our nation has violated its very sacred contract in that it merged religion and politics under Reagan: evangelicals and Washington got married. What the Republicans recognized is that Americans are fundamentally a religious people, and in that religion the majority are Christian. Among the Christian population is a group known as the evangelicals and they were ripe for the taking in terms of political influence – and thus the marriage of church and state was born. The Republicans grabbed onto that, making them the party of God. By default, the Democrats became the liberals, the party associated as godless, whether conscious or unconscious. You saw evidence of this in this past election in which both Democratic and Republican candidates were forced into ridiculous declarations of their personal spiritual beliefs. From this initial merger of church and state under Reagan spun off a lot of party support bargains behind the scenes. This was a blatant breach of the Constitution in terms of the separation of church and state.
FMT: Right.
CM: And the media has gone completely blank in their heads, completely irresponsible and they’re not pursuing any stories they should be pursuing. Where was the media while all this was happening? Where were the investigative reporters who should have been holding the administration responsible, exposing the off-shore concentration camps and torture chambers America had created? Why weren’t the anti-war rallies covered in the media? Why didn’t we scream for Bush’s impeachment? When I think that Clinton faced impeachment for a fling in the Oval Office and Bush created a war because he wanted to be a war president saying, “Oops, I guess I had ‘misinformation’” – and we let him get away with that? I am stunned. Where are those stories about the journalists with gag orders? Where are the stories about Americans having their email checked? I don’t want my email checked. I don’t want my phone checked. When I would bring up these matters at lectures – lectures on consciousness to people who considered themselves as among those dedicated to leading a conscious life, people would say, “I didn’t come here to talk politics,” I say, “You’ve got to wake up and hear what is going on in your nation.”
FMT: And all of this is our environment.
CM: When you definite environment, this is your environment: the environment of your psyche and your soul and your mind. If you define environment by body, mind and spirit, you better define every inch of your environment. YOU are the environment. You cannot separate pieces out; this is not about cherry-picking your definition. The whole of life and all that life includes comprises this entity called “environment.”
FMT: We are complicit in all of this.
CM: We are a ferocious culture of entitlement. I’ve had people say to me, “Do you have any prayers that work? I haven’t gotten what I want.” What, do you think that there’s a Santa Claus in the cosmos that just makes things happen for you because you say a prayer? We have very little understanding about the nature of consciousness in relationship to endurance. We perpetuate the privilege of suffering, the whole idea that if I’m suffering, I’m entitled to something. I deserve this because I’m hurting. I deserve to eat a certain way. I deserve to buy something because I had a difficult day. We don’t trust people who haven’t suffered. Whether conscious or unconsciously, we believe that if people haven’t suffered, they haven’t earned the right to any type of privilege. Thus, it is in our blood and bones to believe that if we’ve been through something difficult, there must be a reason for it and that reason simply has to have a reward built into it. And until that reward shows up, we have to let others know that life has been unfair to us. This is one of the shadow attitudes that underlies this economic crisis we are in, believe it or not. It is no surprise to me that we find ourselves in a time of unparalleled debt. We are also in a culture of unparalleled inner analysis and the excavation of personal pain.
When people are in pain or they have come from a difficult background, they often slip into patterns of thinking that tell them they deserve to balance that pain with something pleasurable. Often that something is expensive. I know several people who have had or are dealing with cancer. The result of their close encounter with death not only heightened their appreciation of the value of their life but it also, unfortunately, expressed itself in careless economic decisions. The attitude of, “I may not be here tomorrow so I am going to get this today,” became their new economic philosophy, replacing a formerly sound way of thinking about money. As it turns out, they are here and now in serious debt. But our approach to having blended the experience of suffering, the need for reward and the quest to find meaning and purpose in our pain, is partly responsible for permission to go out and reward yourself.
We are not, unfortunately, a wisdom culture in which we pass on to the next generation wisdom earned in this generation. Nobody says, I’m going to teach you the value of endurance. I’m going to teach you to endure that pain and walk into it. Some pain is meant to be a companion. Some pain is sacred and you’re meant to walk into it, sit with it; be with it. Not all pain should be discarded, as if it were an enemy. But in this culture, if it isn’t pleasure, it’s an enemy whose assaults give permission for a person to indulge the weaker part of his or her nature. I know loneliness or traumatic memories are difficult to live with at times, but not all the time. If we lock in on our woundedness, as all of us could, it’s actually easy to get comfortable in our discomfort.
FMT: Part of life sometimes is being lonely.
CM: Part of life is being alone. In your aloneness, it is possible to reach a depth and go into that and discover yourself. But people say, “I don’t go there.” You have to because that’s the journey of self-knowledge. But this is not what you’re instructed, going into yourself. “Oh, my God, I’m afraid.” Afraid of what? People act like fear is an excuse to abdicate everything. Of course you’re afraid. Fear is an invitation for a compassionate shove. I know what fear will do to somebody because I have my own fears to deal with all the time and the best thing they can do is go into it and get it out. Confront it. Use it. But don’t let fear consume you or take away your potential to know who you are in this life. Giving into fear is such an easy thing to do. As we look at how we become the kind of people to rebuild this world, it’s not going to be the kind of people that can’t handle being alone, or that can’t handle a little pain. The kind of people that go on from here are people that can endure. People who say, “I can take this and a lot more.” Who have changed their wishbones to backbones. Who have the ability to take off their shoes when they’re on sacred ground and actually say, “I’m going to take my vocabulary back; I’m going to put reverence back in. I’m going to go back to deep and abiding prayer, and it’s not going to be a petition: ‘God, give me more’, but: ‘God, what do you want of me? What do you want of me and I’ll follow. I’ve been asking for stuff and it’s not the way anymore, what do you want from me? Lead me and I’ll go’.”
FMT: I love the idea of the backbone versus the wishbone. We often have the ethos of it’s all about what I want, what’s going to come to me and what I’m going to attract into my life instead of what am I going to work for or believe in or the commitments I’m making.
CM: Help me become what I was born to become. Not “Do it for me and send everybody I need to my door and I will close my eyes and click my heels together and it will just be there.”
FMT: In the moments like now, where collectively we’re so afraid, we need to realize that there’s something other than this altar of greed, money, war and legality that we’ve been worshipping for so long.
CM: Absolutely. In our culture, we’re never taught the tools for the mystic. Nor are we a wisdom culture. We’re never taught to discern between our pathological fear of humiliation and the wise position of being humble.
Most people are driven in their ambitions or completely emotionally scarred either because they’ve been humiliated or because of a fear of being humiliated. Humility, on the other hand, in our culture, is associated with poverty, which is a complete misunderstanding of the power of what it means to be humble. Humility is a grace, beyond self-esteem, giving you the capacity to not need another person to validate your own goodness and value. The humble person is best positioned to live a congruent life; that is, a life in which how they feel, what they say and who they are spiritually, are equally reflected in their personal and public actions.
FMT: We’re not acting in congruity. I look at America today and we’re a country of hungry ghosts, looking for the thing that will fill us, feed us and not seeing what is in each one of us.
CM: Absolutely. But find me a nation that is congruent. Though there is no such thing as a perfect nation, note how when America slips off the beam and loses the moral high ground, and we have thanks to the Bush administration, the crisis is felt globally. Humanity is not a perfect species and never will be. Perfection must never be the goal or creating a perfect world without poverty or war or illness. Life embodies those crises by its very design. But what is possible is that individuals can and do pull out of that orbit of consciousness and as an individual declare, “I will no longer be a creature of war. I will be a peacemaker and I will serve the betterment of humanity.”
The second part of the LA YOGA interview with Caroline Myss will appear in the upcoming May, 2009, issue. Keep your eyes open, and in the meantime, be a peacemaker.
Caroline Myss is the closing keynote speakers at the Hay House-sponsored event I Can Do It! being held at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA. April 30 – May 3. For more information, visit: hayhouse.com
The Caroline Myss Education Institute, CMED, offers online educational material including video and audio programs and well as in-person intensive workshops and retreats nationally and internationally along with online educational material. For more information, visit: myss.com.
By Felicia M. Tomasko, RN
Felicia Tomasko has spent more of her life practicing Yoga and Ayurveda than not. She first became introduced to the teachings through the writings of the Transcendentalists, through meditation, and using asana to cross-train for her practice of cross-country running. Between beginning her commitment to Yoga and Ayurveda and today, she earned degrees in environmental biology and anthropology and nursing, and certifications in the practice and teaching of yoga, yoga therapy, and Ayurveda while working in fields including cognitive neuroscience and plant biochemistry. Her commitment to writing is at least as long as her commitment to yoga. Working on everything related to the written word from newspapers to magazines to websites to books, Felicia has been writing and editing professionally since college. In order to feel like a teenager again, Felicia has pulled out her running shoes for regular interval sessions throughout Southern California. Since the very first issue of LA YOGA, Felicia has been part of the team and the growth and development of the Bliss Network.