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by Caroline Myss
Published by Bantam Books
302 pp. £7.99 paperback
Reviewed by Linda Dangoor-Khalastchi
With a Master's degree in theology behind her, Caroline Myss is, today, a healer and a teacher. Before her present occupation, however, she was a coffee-drinking hard-boiled newspaper reporter who, later, got involved in publishing books about alternative therapies and healing. She did this for purely business reasons and had absolutely no desire to meet healers nor to be involved personally in alternative or holistic medicine.
Things change for her when she begins to have insights into people's illnesses: "... a friend would mention that someone he knew was not feeling well, and an insight into the cause of the problem would pop into my head." Soon, the word about her talent spread in her local community and people began telephoning her at her publishing company for an "intuitive assessment." The turning point in her career came when she began to work closely with a neurosurgeon diagnosing patients at a distance (over the telephone), scanning them "intuitively" like an x-ray machine. It involved patients with serious illnesses which conventional medicine had not been able to locate or treat successfully.
Caroline Myss gives us many astonishing examples of this. One of them concerns the accurate diagnosis, over the telephone, of an HIV positive patient for whom she creates a strict healing programme. After 6 weeks, the patient's blood test is HIV negative and it remains so to this day.
This was the "miracle," regarded by her as a spiritual experience, which turned her "hobby" into the profession she exercises today.
In the Anatomy of the Spirit, Myss shows us how to develop our own latent powers of intuition and to identify and correct an energy imbalance in the body - in her view this results from emotional and existential stresses - which leads eventually to illness. Taking us through three ancient spiritual traditions, the Kabbalah's Tree of Life the Christian Sacrament and the Hindu chakras, she develops a unique program designed to promote physical, emotional and spiritual well-being.
The book is peppered with examples and fascinating case histories which support her views. Explaining what vitality and energy mean in a healthy body, she puts forward the view... "I am responsible for the creation of my health. I therefore participated, at some point, in the creation of this illness."
This is contrary, of course, to conventional medicine which considers the patient as an innocent - virtually powerless - victim who has suffered an unprovoked attack. Caroline Myss empowers us. Healing, she tells us, "requires action, it is not a passive event."
On the whole, an interesting book with an original chapter on how the Sefirot, Sacraments, and Chakras, work together.
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