Caroline Myss: Reigning Queen of Intuition & Empowerment by Terry Loncaric   A sense of urgency crackles in her voice. Caroline Myss is on a tight deadline. Calling her 15 minutes early is not a good idea. I can hear the nervous distraction in her voice, as she struggles to finish a magazine article, and meet her deadline. But then I should know, all writers are on edge when they are in the middle of a deadline. So, I promise to call Myss back, when she is finished with her story. When I do call later, she has that sound of relief in her voice that tells me she completed her magazine article, and not a moment too soon. One would think after knocking out three New York Times best sellers, Myss would have this down to a science. But the prolific writer and public speaker, who lives in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, still sweats bullets every time she has a deadline and worries if she will get the story done. Even though Myss never runs out of things to say in an interview or in front of an audience, the self-confident author is still intimidated by the blank page, just like the rest of us. "I have anxiety attacks when I am writing," Myss admits. "I obsess about deadlines all the time." Myss understands her creative quirks all too well. "When I go to bed, and I am writing something," she reveals, "I always end up in the middle of a sentence. Then I wake up to an active thought the next morning, and I can finish what I started writing. This always works for me." Driven by her intense creativity, yet inspired by her remarkable intellect, Myss is constantly reading, thinking, and merging philosophies. She has a quest to learn all she can about natural health and spirituality. She also has a strange fascination with military history, an interest she says she inherited from her father, a retired Marine. And she admits to having an ambivalent relationship with her Catholic upbringing. Combining all of these disciplines, and her groundbreaking work as a medical intuitive, Myss has become a pioneer in natural healing and an inspiring public speaker. But before Myss realized she had a calling, she struggled to find her spiritual path. Myss worked in the ‘70s as a freelance writer after earning a degree in journalism from St. Mary of the Woods College in South Bend, Ind. At that time she admits she was obsessed with winning the Pulitzer Prize and did not pay much attention to her unhealthy lifestyle. "I had no desire to meet any healers myself," she says. "I refused to meditate. I smoked while drinking coffee by the gallon, still fashioning myself after an image of a hard-boiled newspaper reporter. I was not at all primed for a mystical experience." Myss says she took "a sharp turn" in her life in 1982, when she attended a conference by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and realized she had a wake-up call to do something more spiritual. Faced with what she calls a "crisis in meaning" in her life, Myss decided to quit her career in journalism, return to school and earn a master’s degree in religion from Mundelein College. "I lost my appetite for journalism. It became boring to me," Myss reveals. "Going to graduate school and studying theology was like falling down the rabbit hole of the human spirit. I literally came alive." The puzzle of her life began to fit together in the traditional setting of a Catholic university. "I was so immersed in the study of classical mysticism, and that certainly prepared me to understand spirituality at a very traditional and grounded and classical manner," Myss says. "I had some hard-core teachings which validated everything I thought about healing — that human beings are inherently here to heal." Myss took her learning to the next level when she realized in 1983 she had skills as a medical intuitive. By receiving "rapid impressions," Myss learned she could read a person’s energy fields and identify stress points in the body that could cause potential illnesses. Wishing to sharpen her intuitive skills, Myss earned a Ph.D. in Intuition and Energy Medicine from Greenwich University. As her studies progressed, Myss became fascinated with the relationship of the mind, body and spirit. She became a pioneer, with Dr. Norman Shealy, in the field of energy medicine. Shealy, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon and practitioner of holistic medicine, and Myss have written a book together, "The Creation of Health." They are close friends and have helped one another on research projects. Myss teaches classes at Holos University, Shealy’s college of energy medicine in Springfield, Mo. Even if everyone doesn’t understand this fuzzy field in alternative medicine, Shealy believes Myss has an uncanny accuracy for "reading" people’s medical conditions. "We all know people have energy fields," he says. "Certain people have energy that is magnetic. Caroline has a magnetic attraction to these people." Shealy, the founder of the Holistic Medical Association, says creative people like Myss often have this gift. "What makes a person a medical intuitive?" he asks, then laughs. "Why is the sky blue, Daddy? I think there are geniuses. Mozart was a genius with music. Caroline is a genius with intuition. "I believe every invention is an intuitive download," Shealy adds. "Einstein would have agreed with me." Inspired by her work with Shealy and other holistic practitioners, Myss began to write books about healing. She created a philosophy of healing that focused on ancient religious beliefs and archetypes. But it also involved finding sources of power, harnessing energy and tapping into the strength of the human spirit. "For me," Myss says, "the spirit is the vessel of divinity. Its language is intuitive. Its truth is rooted in ancient wisdom." Myss wrote "Anatomy of the Spirit," her first bestseller, in 1996. A year later she wrote "Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can," her second bestseller and her most practical book about developing strategies of spiritual and natural healing. Three years later she wrote, "Sacred Contracts," a third bestseller about having a relationship with God and our bodies to promote the healing process. In all of these books, Myss talks about how people lose their power to heal and change their lives when they stop trusting their intuition. "People have too many distractions that get in the way of their heart’s calling," she says. "The spirit has the capacity to love, to heal and to create. Most people repress that." That is the gentle Caroline Myss. Then there is the tough love Caroline Myss, the motivational speaker, who gets right in your face, and tells you to start taking risks and to move beyond your hurdles. And that kind of honesty and her strong personality has made Myss an immensely appealing self-help author and spiritual leader to millions of followers. She is a frequent guest on Oprah’s show. And her fans crowd the Internet for a chance to participate in her Online discussions on spiritual topics. "I’m very much the teacher, the researcher, the pioneer person who likes to explore research material nobody has swam around in," Myss says. "I get a charge out of teaching people," Myss adds. "I get people to go to the mirror to really look at themselves. I tell them, ‘Do you know that time is your most precious commodity? For people who want to hold on to their junk, I am not the person to go to." Myss tells people to allow their most "outrageous selves — their spiritual selves" to come to the surface. And she also advises people to honor their contract with God. "Keep your honor code between you and God," Myss insists. "You don’t break that, no matter who’s not looking. God is." She says most people resist the difficult work that goes with spiritual transformation. "Healing requires conscious choices," Myss emphasizes. "Very few alcoholics want to give up liquor. Obese people don’t want to give up food. Diabetics don’t want to give up sugar. People in toxic relationships don’t want to leave because that’s what they know. It’s change. People are afraid of change." Myss says power — and how we use it — influences our chances for a healthy, happy life. She enjoys sharing an anecdote about how power is even expressed at her workshops. "I have watched it in my audiences," Myss observes. "Even the people who sit in the front row of my workshops are the people with the power. They run, put their sweaters down on their seats, go for their coffee, and they mark their territory. God help anyone who tries to steal their place. "People don’t realize that every thing about life is merely and totally the challenge of power," Myss reveals. "Power is the only and ultimate ingredient in the human experience. With the loss of health, you’ve lost your power. How many marriages break up over power?" "This is how I direct people," Myss adds. "I get people to recognize what has power over their lives. As long as we will away our spirits, minds and bodies — as long as we sell off any of our freedom — our highest potential is not possible. Shealy, a mentor to Myss, admires how far she has come spiritually, and in her work. "Every thought is a prayer and thinking is what brings about spiritual change," says Shealy. "That is also the core of Caroline’s work. She prays daily, and even though she speaks critically of Catholicism, she certainly embraces it in her life." Myss loves challenging people, asking tough questions, and then leading people down a path of transformation. Shealy says Myss can energize and inspire an audience with her stories, her sense of her humor and her tremendous charisma. "She’s a superb teacher," he remarks. "She keeps people awake, alert and interested, and she provokes people to think deeper. "She has the ability to help people understand their personal blocks," Shealy emphasizes. "That is really what it is. We all have certain places where we have blocks. Caroline’s method of describing those blocks catches the attention of people and often helps them move forward." But Shealy admits his friend is better at preaching spiritual balance to others than following it herself. He says Myss is a driven workaholic who can rarely slow down. "I’ve told Caroline you don’t have to build Rome in a day," Shealy comments. "She’s almost obsessed with doing too many jobs. But that is her path." Myss admits says she has difficulty limiting herself. She rarely turns down a workshop, and she is almost always traveling somewhere to conduct a conference. "I’m an intense teacher," she reveals. "I know what I teach others about living a balanced life is the truth. That doesn’t mean I can live it. "I embrace my flaws, and I go in and out of balance all the time," Myss says. She admits to having "a bad temper." And she can eat unhealthy foods without even feeling an ounce of guilt. "On a hot day," Myss laughs, "I would sell my soul for a chocolate malt." Myss describes her life as "one fat blessing" because she has the love and support of friends and family, and she is passionately living her life and taking professional risks. But that is not always enough, the high-powered author quietly reveals. "The only thing missing in my life is that I never had a child," Myss admits. "I can see all of my friends grow old, and they have children in their lives. That’s an empty spot." But Myss does not seem all that regretful about the choices she has made in her extremely fulfilling life. She is driven by her fierce passion as a teacher, her desire to keep learning, and her quest to keep sharing her knowledge with the people who read her books and attend her seminars. Right now she is working feverishly on her fourth book, "The Sacred Contract of the United States," a spiritual report on the State of the Union. "I have developed a passionate interest in using archetypes to interpret historical events," Myss says. "I literally immersed myself in the most minute details of the history of the American psyche." She says her book will offer suggestions for healing a wounded nation in the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of the Iraq. "We are completely shattered as a nation," Myss says. "Any time a nation has gotten defensive and war-like, it has become frightened." And when she is not working in her Oak Park study, where she writes all of her books, Myss brainstorms with her staff on workshops and promotional events. She operates an educational institute to handle her popular speaking engagements. Almost every day her staff fields requests for workshops and personal appearances. Even though she has a frantic life, Myss enjoys the quiet time she spends in Oak Park with her family and close friends. She says she has a lot of cousins who still live in the Chicago area. And when she recently had an opportunity to promote and autograph her three books, she visited Abruzzo’s, a favorite Italian restaurant, in Melrose Park, the working class Italian neighborhood, where she grew up. Even though Myss is certainly a celebrity, while she signed her books, she did not present the image of a famous visiting author, as she smiled, chatted and ate pasta with pals from her old neighborhood. And Myss even laughed when the restaurant owners asked if they could put her picture on the wall next to other visiting celebrities, namely Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. "What — me on the wall?" Myss asked. "Are you kidding?" Forget that Myss has sold millions of books. Or that she is on a first-name basis with Oprah. Those are just blessings. "I don’t think of myself as famous," Myss reveals. She says a nun gave her some advice that always kept her humble. "I had a wise nun ask me, when I was graduating from college, ‘What are you going to do?’ I gave her a list of things, including winning the Pulitzer Prize. She said, ‘Whatever you do in this lifetime, don’t let glamour poison you.’ "God has given me such a ferocious personality, I couldn’t teach what I didn’t believe," Myss reveals. "If I ever made my goal admiration or any of that stuff, I’d pay a holy price for it. That’s the one thing I’ve kept from Catholicism. God could render me humble in a New York second. I’ve kept my eyes on the target (my work). The rest is in God’s hands." For information and registration details about upcoming workshops with Caroline Myss, please call David Smith at 847-266-8630, or write to The Office of Caroline Myss, 1004 Brittany Road, Highland Park, IL, 60035, USA.