A few years ago, Caroline Myss was sitting in a Ritz-Carlton hotel having Sunday brunch. A student of human nature and the author of seven books about just that, Myss was eavesdropping, naturally. One table over sat a slight hummingbird of a woman celebrating her 89th birthday with her daughter, who was doing all the talking. “I saw So-and-So the other day, and she looked terrible,” Myss recalls the daughter saying. “And do you remember what she was like? She had a horrible marriage.” The mother sat there pushing food around her plate. Finally she laid down her fork, lifted her eyes, and said, “You know what, honey? I don’t remember those people. I don’t remember a lot of things. Why don’t you just remind me of what I loved? I don’t have time to think of anything else.” The daughter reeled back but moments later offered this: “Well, you know that heart you’re wearing? Daddy gave that to you.” The mother cupped the pendant around her neck and said, “No wonder I never want to take it off!” The daughter went on to remind her about who and what she loved. “It was one of the most precious, beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed,” says Myss. “By the time I left, I was in tears. ‘Remind me of what I loved.’” And that’s exactly what Caroline Myss (pronounced “Mace”) stands for: speaking no-nonsense truth. What she doesn’t have patience for is, well, BS. You might expect this five-time New York Times best-selling author—her most recent book is Archetypes: Who Are You?‚—and internationally renowned speaker in the fields of human consciousness, spirituality, energy medicine, and medical intuition to be a gentle, hug-giving hippie. Nope. Rather, she’s a power-suit-wearing straight shooter with groundbreaking theories on health and illness, which she’s been exploring for decades. Myss believes there are hidden interactions between your soul and your body that either keep you well or make you sick. This field, which she helped develop, is called energy anatomy, and it correlates specific emotional, physical, and spiritual stress patterns with disease. Like traditional Chinese medicine, which centers around the body’s energy, or qi, the thinking is that when one of your seven chakras is blocked—whether due to physical injury or emotional repression—you’re not going to feel well. More simply: If you let yourself get bogged down with negativity, you’re going to get sick. Before you write this off as black-and-white, it’s-your-fault-for-getting-sick thinking—something a number of critics have done over the years—stop it, says Myss. “That’s total nonsense. If that were true—if only negative people were ill—we wouldn’t have to fill prisons! Rapists and pedophiles and the Senate would be gone,” she says. “There’s no one answer for every one problem.” A way to look at illness, says Myss, is to think of it as the point of an arrow that identifies your main vulnerability—it’s a place to start, but everything else has to come into play, too. “When you evaluate your health, you have to evaluate every organ in the body, but you start with the one that’s most inflamed,” she says. As for her own body and her own soul, Myss is guarded. “I prefer privacy,” she says. She’ll tell you that she shares her Oak Point, IL, home with her cockapoo, Abbey, and has two brothers (one of whom “had the nerve to die on me in 2000”) and numerous nieces and nephews she treasures. Beyond that? “Nobody needs to hear about the particulars—it’s enough to hear the lessons in my voice,” she says. “The rest falls under the heading of None of Your Business Why I Know It. It’s enough that I know it.” Here’s what she knows. You should never be too busy for love. I talk to my younger brother every day. I check in with my mother many times a day. I just got two calls from one niece and an e-mail from another, and I always respond right away. Everything is about choice and priorities, isn’t it? It’s not a matter of how much time you spend talking—it doesn’t need to be a 30-minute conversation but a 2- or 3-minute one: “Are you there? How are you doing? Do you need anything? OK, talk to you later.” It’s a staccato note, not a whole one, and enough staccato notes make up a melody. That’s the important message. The other little details of your day aren’t going to be a big deal in 2 weeks. But loving someone will be a big deal every day. Don’t let picking up the phone be a hard thing to do. Don’t ever be too busy for love. You’ll regret it if you do. You have to find and live your own personal truth. When someone says to me, “What is my truth?” I say, “I don’t know, what is it? That’s your journey; I’ve found mine.” I have spent years excavating me. Years. One of your biggest tools is your intuition. Not listening to it is what makes life hell on earth. Ignore it and you’ll live a life of self-betrayal. You’ll get angry, you’ll have to find someone to blame—your childhood, your ex-husband—and you’ll never get off the cycle. You’ll never heal. If you follow your intuition, your life might look very different, but your intuition wanted you to make a change for a reason. And now you get to discover what’s next for you, what great opportunity awaits. (Not in touch with loved ones? Here’show to reconnect.) Don’t worry so much about being liked. Don’t do your work to try to make people like you; do your work because you love it. I teach because I so respect the fields of mysticism, spirituality, and truth. That means I regard it as a pleasure and a privilege to pass on the knowledge to other people. But if I taught in the hopes that it would make people like me, I might as well be a lifeguard who pushes people in the pool, rescues them, and then hangs around all day hoping to be praised. Don’t do that. Do your work, and if you do make a mistake, own it. If a criticism of you is valid, acknowledge it, own it, and move on. Fearing pain is a mistake. Some pain is essential, like the pain that’s caused when you do something stupid or the pain that happens in your body to alert you that you’re sick. You cannot simultaneously hold the beliefs that life is about learning and that life is only about pleasure, that if you’re uncomfortable, you’re doing something wrong. Life is not a fancy hotel where you get to order up a special pillow because it’s all about comfort. Pain is an indicator, a signal that says, “Stop and look at this; something is hurting you, and you must do something about it.” And yet so many people ignore pain. Why? Because we’re terrified of the truth. We can’t stand it. Truth is the greatest change agent in life; as soon as you know the truth about something, you have to make a choice. As soon as you admit the truth—‘I’m not happy here" or “This hurts”—you have to do something about it. Nothing stays the same when the truth comes out. MORE:Is This The Life You’re Meant To Live?
