Caroline Myss America’s Modern Myss-tic
Interview by Laurie Nadel, PhD
(for the full article and multimedia experience, click here: OM-Times December 2009 Edition)
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If you are tired of pundits and bloggers rehashing sound-bites, New York Times best-selling author Caroline Myss looks at today’s economic and political crisis through a different lens. In her new book Defying Gravity (Hay House) she examines the current melt-down as a collective spiritual crisis that is rooted in a loss of respect for the values upon which our nation was founded.
Q: How do you see the economic crisis? Myss: Everything looks the same except more and more storefronts are empty. More and more businesses are shut down. We have outsourced ourselves. We made foolish decisions of the soul. We ceased to be humble and we became arrogant in our policies. We are no longer people of wisdom or reflection.
Q: For example? Myss: Everybody had to sacrifice to get here, to start their lives anew. They wanted to do it. In order to get to this land of great promise, our ancestors had to make sacrifices. People were not afraid of what that meant. But since World War Two, we have forgotten about the need to sacrifice. Instead, we feel a sense of entitlement because we have suffered. It goes something like this: “I need a 52-inch flat screen TV now because I had a lousy childhood/nasty divorce/lost my job.” I am entitled to stuff because I was hurt. We wear our wound from the past like a badge.
Q: What do you recommend? Myss: Prayer. Not the kind of prayers where you ask for more stuff. The kind where you sit in deep silence and reflect. Ask for humility. For patience. In those moments when you pray, you can feel yourself lifted up to a place that is transcendent of ordinary life. A spiritual force initiates that. All of you is present. You are not living your history. During that time, you can feel as though the weight of your life has been lifted from your shoulders. For a microsecond , you defy gravity.
Q: How do you prepare for this? Can you go to a spiritual trainer? Myss: That’s a perfect question. That’s exactly where one begins. Question the value of being so busy. There comes a time in a stress- filled life when we have to question the manner in which we have organized our values. When people are dying, they realize their values are screwed up. You can’t wait to realize that you have placed your values in the wrong basket. This idea of ‘I don’t have time because my life is so busy, so busy, so busy’ means that you are living in a panic attack.
