Unlearning "Woundology" Caroline Myss speaks with Kris Kegg If you have witnessed Caroline Myss in action, perhaps you can understand how I might have felt a wee bit of intimidation about actually interviewing her — in person, no less! Although I found myself with more questions than time, I must say that I was surprised by my new regard for this human being, often noted as a rare genius and one of the most remarkable women on the planet today. Kris: Let’s start with the origin of the term "medical intuitive." It’s not a term that preceded you, correct? Caroline: Well, you have to have some way to describe what you do, so I made it up. What I do is assist in the evaluation of a person’s health by interpreting their energetic data, which reveals a great deal about their emotional, psychological, and physical history. My premise is that "your biography becomes your biology" and that it influences your health tremendously. It also provides a physician with a great deal of information that a patient wouldn’t normally think of or consider important. Kris: Your goal, as I understand it, is to educate instead of making medical intuition something that could be licensed or accredited in some way; is that correct? Caroline: I think a little of both. Long-term — not until we cross over into the next millenium — I would like to see medical intuition become a licensed and respected profession. I’m not sure what that will require or how long it will take. It’s very naïve of people to think that they can take a five-day workshop with me and emerge a medical intuitive when it took me 14 years to perfect. I won’t even have a conversation with someone who thinks that way! If I did put together a training program, it would be a serious academic one including classes in classical mysticism, anatomy, and physiology — basic stuff. Norm Shealy would be involved in that, of course; he was my mentor in that area. I would also include a residency with physicians, similar to the one I did, and I would never support someone having an independent practice unless a physician signed off on it. Licensing may be part of it, but I would never ever create a situation in which either a student of mine or I myself could face a lawsuit for practicing medicine without a license. Another thing you’ve got to deal with in doing an intuitive reading is that, as in a physical examination, information that is gathered from your blood sample is true only today. Tomorrow will likely give a whole different reading, literally. When someone goes to an intuitive who says, "I don’t see anything wrong with you today," people take that as a lifetime’s validation that they are totally healthy and if something changes tomorrow, they say it’s their intuitive’s fault because the intuitive didn’t see it. I really have withdrawn from the practice completely because, first of all, I don’t see that as my role. My role is to learn from the practice and to teach people about the human energy system as I work with it. When I worked with Norm, it was safe because we worked directly with his patients. When working with other physicians, I worked through the physician. S/he would call me and say, "What’s wrong with this person?" I would give the doctor an evaluation and then they would take the material and incorporate that into an evaluation for their patient. I would say to Norm, for instance, that this person is developing cancer, it’s going to come in physically within four to six months, and here are the stress factors involved. Norm certainly would never say to his patient, "You’re developing cancer"; he would say, "Let’s deal with these stress factors." That’s the way to handle this and that’s the way I was most effective, seeing an illness before it occurred. That’s when it could be redirected. We did so many of these that we knew if someone didn’t shift gears, they generally did get an illness. If they did make a shift, their likelihood of not getting an illness increased substantially. Kris: As a person who left the church early on and knew little about the sacraments, my favorite part of the book came at the end when you wrote about a workshop in Mexico, during which you had a minister come in to perform the sacraments for the participants… Caroline: As a matter of fact, that person lives here in Seattle and we share the same birthday, which is today! We met in London in 1985 and found lots of parallels in our lives. She was the renegade Episcopal priest — women had yet to be ordained there. She was arrested and put in the Tower of London — quite an intriguing story. At that workshop in Mexico, she actually performed the sacraments, and I taught the symbolic meaning as it applies to our process of ascension, dealing with power. Each of us will inevitably go through stages of evolution and power. No one can omit it. Everybody will evolve through the stage of wanting to control others personally to having to learn control of the self — internal control. Kris: It feels as though there will be people who simply cannot do this. Caroline: I think that’s true. We can totally block our evolution and reach a level of our power interplay in which we just cannot cope with living beyond that, which I see very often. For instance, I might say to someone, "You’ve really got to let go of this resentment you feel toward this person," or "You’ve really got to see this situation as one in which perhaps there is a larger lesson involved." Their mind might hear it, and they might actually say, "You know what, you’re right!" Yet when you bring that into the lower frequencies, the heart, it goes nowhere, because the fact is that some people simply cannot cope with the spiritual aspect of betrayal. For them, betrayal is such a personalized experience that they want a personalized act of vengeance. Kris: I was struck by the power of what you call "woundology" when I found myself being much more appreciative of you after reading about your "wound" in this book. There was, indeed, that instant intimacy to which you refer. You model this new behavior of deleting wounds from the vocabulary beautifully, and yet I cannot help wondering how difficult it must have been for you personally to leap over to this new way of being and communicating. Caroline: You know, when people ask me how to change something, I never tell them to do anything big. If you do something small, it has enormous consequences in that it spirals. You cannot stop speaking "woundology" and not have your whole life change, because what you’re really doing is ending a pattern of blame. That means that you have found the door into your consciousness, and that you have walked through that door, becoming more aware of yourself through your relationship to blame and how you see others. Now, that is going to plant a lot of seeds. All you need is one step to get into a room. Once you’re in that room, you see a whole different world and you can never deny that you’ve been there. Kris: Do you get lots of people who are incensed by this discussion? Caroline: Three years ago, when I put out the tape Why People Don’t Heal, I was literally inundated with letters saying, "Thank God, someone finally did it!" Many of those letters referred to the fact that they passed the tape on to someone they knew, saying, "I’m just tired of them speaking woundology!" I also got letters from people who said, "Finally, I caught myself!" I never received one from someone who said, "You’re off the edge; how dare you talk to us like this?" The first time I ever got such a response was the result of an article in The Yoga Journal. They printed positive responses to the article one month, followed the second month by letters from people who wrote, "She’s so unfeeling and lacking in compassion." Such nonsense! That will always be the case, though. You’d be harming yourself more by thinking you’re not going to get that combination. Besides, I have a thick skin and a good sense of humor. Kris: That tape was titled Why People Don’t Heal; however, this book goes on and adds, "and How They Can." Caroline: It also takes the subject of why people don’t heal into a much deeper analysis, because once I saw the response, I started studying all the more. I had no idea that it would cause such shock waves. That tape was the most popular tape [its publisher] Sounds True has ever had, and it was number one for the year. That’s why the publishing company said, "Do a book!" With that kind of response, I started realizing that something was going on here. The more I looked, the more I saw a much more involved subject than the tape revealed. In the book, I talk about three levels of consciousness that are part of the way we think. We have Tribal consciousness, as well as Individual and Symbolic, all operating in us simultaneously. "Woundology" is our attempt to remain within Tribal law and order. It gives us leverage so that, number one, we can stay in the position that everybody has "done unto us," and we’ve never done anything to anybody else! Two, it allows us to hold onto the need to seek our system of justice versus a larger system of justice — a larger one that may well be in order. In addition, the other person has as much just cause as we do. If we really knew his/her history spiritually, we would be compelled to apply that same compassionate viewpoint to him/her. If we stay within the concept of woundology, we give ourselves permission to use only our five senses to analyze what we’re looking at. Giving up woundology is really a shift into a very different dimension that is far more challenging to manage, yet far more accurate to what truth is. When using three-column sight, your first column is tribal and there you encounter what is true. In the other two columns (individual and symbolic), you encounter what’s truth. We could say we’re both sitting here on a Tuesday afternoon, and that would be true. If we sat here and said, "Why do you think we’re here doing this interview," we could play games for the rest of our lives, but we will not know what the truth is ever! The truth is that we won’t know, and everything else is mere human speculation on a Tuesday afternoon. Kris: Your book addresses the issue of healing at more than a physical level, right? Caroline: I feel that my mission, along with lots and lots of other people's, is to help educate and introduce a new dimension of consciousness. That is the mission of everybody — of our culture. I do not know the minds of the "gods," so it would be foolish to measure by our standards what we think might happen. All I know is that I need to do my task: educating people to understand how they lose their spirit and how not to do that and, in addition, why it’s so foolish to let your spirit go and how powerful it is to consciously make investments. I have to say, though, that it makes me nervous to see people who claim their consciousness, myself included. I teach this stuff, and I can’t live it! Kris: What I hear you saying is that we have to be able to transcend this dimension. Is that so? Caroline: That is what I am saying, and it is very frightening. There is a part of us that inherently knows that if I begin the process of transcendence to another dimension, there’s a real good chance that "my life ain’t gonna be the same." It’s not just that your life is not the same. You may not like your wife or your husband or your job anymore, so it can be pretty terrifying. The fact is that we will always have to continue growing; we can never stop. Kris: Some people do stop though, and end up sick. Caroline: Do they, or do they just start learning about why they’re sick? Kris: Why bother to better yourself, then, if, indeed, everything is as it needs to be? Caroline: Paradox is one of the strongest languages of divinity. You must always respond to your life. How can you not? Even if you don’t respond, that is a response. Even if you decide to not grow, you’re growing! You’ve made a decision to learn how to grow by not growing. Caroline Myss is a pioneer in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness. Her newest book, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, was released in October, and Sacred Contracts will be out in late 1998. She can be contacted through Crown Publishing at 201 East 50th Street, New York, NY 10022, or you can visit her web site <http://www.myss.com>. Kris Kegg and her life partner, Patrick Snetsinger, market integrative health products through Healthy Steps, Inc. in Bellevue, WA: (425) 646-1040 or <mlmtrainer@aol.com>. She is an artist and educator who is infamous for asking, "why?"