Caroline Myss: Breaking Through Fear—Welcome to Spiritual Home Base

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.

Caroline Myss: What I’m saying to you is that part of going to spiritual home base is that you start treating yourself as a very awake, active intuitive who senses your world as well as uses it.

Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, we’re featuring a special excerpt from medical intuitive and bestselling author Caroline Myss’s opening presentation, offered as part of Spiritual Home Base—a new online community where Caroline serves as our spiritual director, guiding us to discover, and return again and again to, what she calls spiritual home base: living a faith-filled life.

Stay with us.

I’ve been in the unique position of producing more than twenty full-length audio learning programs with Caroline over the past three decades. Almost all of these sessions have been recorded in intimate settings with a small studio audience, and interestingly, there comes a time in almost every single recording when Caroline is talking directly to a participant and she backpedals a little bit.

Maybe they’re asking about a health challenge, a relationship or family issue, a passage through a difficult time—you might even call it a dark night of the soul—and Caroline will say, “Now, if I were your spiritual director, here’s what I would tell you.” During this time, when so many of us feel unmoored and in need of spiritual direction, Caroline Myss is the spiritual director for this new online community, where all are welcome to join.

You can learn more at myss.com/spiritual-homebase.

And now, here’s an excerpt from Caroline Myss’s opening talk, returning us to spiritual home base.

Caroline Myss: Hello to all of you, and thank you—thank you so much for being here with us tonight. I’d like to start with a blessing. I chose this particular prayer because of the lecture I have planned for this evening.

May God bless us not with clean air alone, but with the will to keep our air clean. May God bless us not with a vision of a healthy planet alone, but with the will to do all in our power to restore and maintain our planet’s health. May God bless us not with a change of heart in the great world leaders alone to save our planet, but with a change in our own hearts, to use our own power to save the planet.

May the blessing of God not bring us to saints alone, but make us saints greater than we could ever have imagined.

Okay? When I start to organize myself for these classes and organize my thoughts, I always think, “Well, I want to limit it to this”—and then everything I want to say jumps into my head and takes off.

We’re going to start, as I like to start every class, with a symbolic sight report.1 What I mean by this—and I’ll talk more about this later—is that we are shifting so much that our symbolic instincts are waking up. The types of questions we’re asking today are cosmic in size, and they’re not answered by ordinary intellect.

So I want to take you into what I would call the observational mode. Imagine that we’re all drifting off the planet just to observe. The question is: what’s going on at this time in human evolution? Not your evolution, but evolution as it’s unfolding—as if any of us could actually answer that question.

But what we can do is adjust our perceptual system so that we cease looking for the reasons why things happen as they do, and instead look at how we observe what is happening.2 We are, as you all know, living at a time of unprecedented change, but it’s the type of change that’s happening that holds the clues for us—and those changes are happening both within us and around us.

If I had to summarize quickly what I think is happening, and make it bite-size: I think we’ve reached a place in human evolution where the way we have understood life, understood ourselves, understood our own power, and understood how we work in the world and with each other is no longer wide enough, deep enough, or truth-filled enough to sustain us for the next leg of the human experience.

I think it’s not unlike when the Western world discovered that the world was round and not flat. Up until that time, the world was flat—that was the reality they knew, and their whole understanding was based on it: it’s a flat world, and you fall off when you get to the edge, and that’s all there is to it.

Then it became round. Now, the world was always round—that’s the important part. The world was always round, but humanity lacked the wherewithal, at least in Europe, to comprehend that. And then they got it, and it changed everything. It changed navigation. It changed their understanding of wind currents, of southern winds. In that same way, we have been living within a collection of thoughts that are now evaporating—from how we understand God, to how we understand energy, to how we understand our own power.

So if I’ve got you looking over the planet and seeing all the different kinds of changes that are happening, I think it’s very tempting to say, “Oh, this is the fault of this person, and this is the fault of that person.” But in order to actually understand something, imagine that you’ve come to me for a reading, and something is wrong. You know how much of your history is involved in your suffering. But if I just said, “Well, you’ve got a bad headache,” and took only what’s happening to you right now—discounting all of that because it’s not in front of me, just you and your headache—and dismissed how you came to have headaches, what your stress problems were, I would have a very imbalanced and inaccurate understanding of the migraine you’re experiencing.

In that same way, we have to look at all that’s evolving here and ask: what exactly is happening?

So let me give you my hit on it.

I think the way the universe works is that it gives us collective downloads—downloads that suddenly reshape us. And here’s the thing: we don’t even realize it’s happening. It just gets absorbed into the collective soul. Just as we have the internet, we have an inner-net.3 And when those downloads happen, they happen to all of us simultaneously.

I believe one of the downloads that happened is tied to the fact that we entered the nuclear age—we entered through weaponry, with the intention of killing or holding the planet hostage, holding ourselves nuclear hostage. And unfortunately, we lack the moral bandwidth to manage our appetite for destruction. We still live in the illusion that somehow, because we live over here in the United States, or in Europe, or wherever, that distance will protect us from the fallout of a nuclear disaster. I want to highlight that idea of distance, because I don’t think it’s heaven’s way to suddenly send a big message, or apparitions that say, “Just stop it.” The way heaven moves us is that we start craving different things. We start looking at life differently.

Two things happened in the sixties, I believe, directly tied to the fact that we were so excited about our newfound power to destroy.

We started to talk about how we create our own reality. Nobody, nobody pre–nuclear age, would have ever put that sentence together: “Well, I create my reality.” Nobody. It was a mystical revelation—a revelation of a high mystical truth. And that high mystical truth is that you are co-creators of the world you live in. You are co-creators, and the only way you’re going to survive this very tenuous era you’re in is to evolve to a place where you become incapable of even thinking about the weaponry you have. I’m going to apply that to us individually, because that weaponry includes the power of our consciousness.

But that’s one. The next download was: become whole. Life is one. All is one. This was one of the messages of Jesus, of Buddha—that the one is in the whole. But we’ve never taken that high mystical truth and actually absorbed it, or lived by it, or applied it. We can speak about it. So heaven, in its cleverness, incarnated it into our understanding of health: that in order for us to really grapple with suffering, health, and healing, we need to approach it from a holistic point of view. We can’t divide ourselves and say, “Well, you go to a doctor, and the doctor says, ‘You have a horrible heart condition, and I have heart medicine, but it’s going to hurt your kidneys—but no problem, you have two of them.'” Nobody would say to that doctor, “Well, that works for me, I’ll take the risk.” Instead, it’s: get the whole picture.

Similarly—and this is vital to understand where we’re going today—we started to include in our expanding understanding of health our psychic needs, our psychology, our intellectual issues, our belief patterns, our attitudes. We finally began to say that maybe the invisible part of us has more authority than the physical part of us. Maybe, just maybe, the power—everything that has power—is not physical. The physical has the least amount of power, by far the loudest and definitely the most destructive, but it’s not the kind of power that sustains life or creates life.

So we became focused on holistic health, on becoming whole, on becoming inclusive. From that came movements like the environmental movement, and simultaneously, this incredible interest in our psychic abilities.

Now, nobody sat everyone down and said, “Does it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, the next dimension of your sensory system has opened up?”—that this download was part of preparing for the next leg of the human journey. You need more senses than the five-sensory world you have. You have to understand the hologram. You have to understand the consciousness of energy. Because that’s exactly what’s happening: the human design has undergone the most extraordinary transition and opening of its intuitive, mystical, psychic, spiritual, energetic sensory system. And that is, in some ways, matched by how we have filled our invisible airwaves with forms of intelligence we’ve never had to grapple with before.

We have created AI. There are changes happening faster than we can comprehend them, faster than we can even ask, “What will be the consequence of this? What will this do for us?” I want to keep us floating on the observation deck, looking down, because you’re able to grapple with an idea when you can hold it without immediately asking, “Is this destructive or productive for my life?” Rather, we’ve reached a stage where we are advancing how we interact with the world around us and the world within us—how we understand ourselves. Part of that includes expanding our consciousness. And what does that mean? It means we are expanding our sensitivity to data we have never before recognized as data.

Through my whole career as a medical intuitive, nothing made more sense to me than doing a medical intuitive reading. It was effortless—because I never once, not for one moment in my life, thought that something was wrong with me. So many of my students over the years have said, “I thought something was wrong with me.” I knew nothing was wrong with me. I knew I was perceiving the world the way it is, and that other people—this included, by the way, but we’ll go there another night—it never occurred to me that I was the one who was off. Because when I looked at how frightened adults were, how insecure—I could sense that level of data around them—I would think, why are they so frightened to be alive? Why are they so afraid of life?

In my world, that was the last thing I was afraid of. In fact, I couldn’t get enough energetic data, and nothing made more sense to me than getting downloads of information about how to help others. What I realized, maybe a little early in life, was that we are intuitively wired to care for each other. Today, I think our inner wiring is competing with our intellectual wiring. Our energetic anatomical system is longing to be recognized. In our medical world, as well as in our spiritual world, it’s time for us to start examining our energetic health with the same precision with which we examine our physical health—to understand how we work energetically, and what it means to sense that we’re picking up something in our airwaves.

Just decades ago, our airwaves were not filled with energetic data the way they are now—not filled with the constant internet, with AI, with hundreds, maybe thousands of satellites beaming down to us constantly. This was filled with spiritual guidance; it was not competing with all the technological stuff. I won’t have anything technological in my bedroom at night—no television, no computer—because I don’t want anything in my airwaves. And even though that doesn’t stop it, I’m very much aware that our airwaves are filled with data and information, and we have yet to think of ourselves as receivers of it.

So I’m going to hit a pause button here. I called this session “Breaking Through Fear,” because the groundwork I’m laying is, I think, part of the beginning of an explanation for why we’re experiencing an epidemic of fear that doesn’t seem to have a target. There is so much fear, anxiety, depression, addiction in our world right now—massive amounts. And in order for people to deal with it, they have to target somebody. They say, “It’s this, it’s that, it’s immigration, it’s whatever.” But it’s not. It’s that we are sensing that our familiar world is changing. We sense it. We don’t know how to language it. We don’t know what change to expect. It’s not like knowing the reason I have anxiety driving home is because they tore up my street.

What we sense is that the myths that have held our world together are dissolving—we don’t even sense this consciously, but we sense it, because the word has gone out like another download: that this call toward holism is reshaping the world we know, and that the conflicts we have, no matter what they are, share something in common if we look at them spiritually and mystically: an inability to recognize the higher mystical truth that a rising tide lifts all ships—that it’s time for this planet to coordinate its power into a global community.

Think of it like your body. If your heart said, “I’m sorry, I need to be the toughest organ in the body, I need to call the shots, I need to decide what organs get food, what organs get supplies, what organs get a vaccine”—instead of realizing that if everybody is not taken care of, no one is taken care of—you’d say that heart is brain-dead. What is happening is that a whole new dimension of truth about who we are, how we function, and how we need to function is unfolding within our cell tissue and around us.

Part of that great teaching is that we are the engines of creation. This is a big deal, because what it signals is the end of God as we understand God. I never thought I’d say a sentence like that, but part of what has become obsolete is even how we understand the nature of God.

You see these mass exoduses from our churches and synagogues, and what you see a rise in is fundamentalism—and that always rises when people are afraid. Always. It’s “I’m going back to the fundamentals.” Think about it: when you’re raising children, and one of your kids comes home suddenly speaking in ways that shock you—maybe they’ve started to swear, maybe they’ve started to smoke, whatever it is—something signals, “Whoa, whoa, you’re growing up too old, too fast.” And so it’s back to fundamentals: “I’m taking away your phone, I need to slow down the speed at which you’re progressing, because it’s too fast for me.”

So it’s no surprise that we see buildups of fundamentalism, whether in the Nazi Party or in a fundamentalist church—it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same thing. Energetically, it’s the psychic force in the human experience that says, “I don’t want to move forward, I don’t want to change,” so it devotes its life force, its energy, its intellect, its belief patterns to organizations whose belief patterns are, by nature, like molasses—they slow the progression of human consciousness. That’s how you understand this rise in fundamentalism, and this rise in the need to change laws in order to slow the progress of people—to make education more expensive, to take away people’s capacity to progress financially. All of this, as horrendous as it is, is actually—if I were your spiritual director and could take you off the planet—exactly what I would tell you to expect. You should expect exactly that kind of action to unfold on your planet, because there is a big faction of human consciousness that does not want to move progress forward, and there is a faction that does. These two factions are going to collide.

What I learned as a medical intuitive—and I come to understand this more deeply as the years go by—is how incredibly powerful every single human being is, and how most human beings don’t get that. They just don’t get it. There were times I would bang my head against a desk, because there is something in our nature where we simply want the object of power—the reason things happen as they do—to be something external that we can attack, or control, or negotiate with, or sign a contract with. We simply cannot get that we are the engines of co-creation, and that every single thought we have is a profound act of creation. We don’t get that—just like we don’t get the size of the universe. So we live as though we’re the only life on this planet.

But I’m saying to you: one of the great mystical truths animated in you is that you are participating in every act of creation. One of the ways we have to change our thinking—and this is part of your homework—is to dismantle the toxic illusion that somehow, if we are living here, what’s happening there won’t affect us. The truth is that in the energetic domain, which is now getting wired into our physical life through the internet, how much of your time do you spend every day plugged into your phone or your computer? I want you to think of this as: where you focus your attention, your power is plugged into a world you cannot see. You can’t see those satellites, you can’t see anything operating in space, but you trust it’s there. It’s easier for you to trust that than to trust God, whom you also can’t see—so you plug yourself into the energetic world. Quite literally, we’re ushering ourselves into this energetic domain through technology, because we can touch technology, and that’s fine.

But from another point of view, what that has done is alter our relationship to time, space, and speed. That’s so important. How many of you have said, “Where is time going? Time just seems to be going so fast”? It’s because we are the ones who created our relationship with this thing we call time. What is time? The only way we know it is by a wristwatch. We measure what we call time in hours, but in fact, time is a construct of consciousness—and how we experience time is directly related to the speed at which we want to embrace truth.

If you still mailed a letter to a friend in Europe, it would take two weeks to get there. Now it takes two seconds if you use your computer. We’ve changed the speed. If I send a question to someone, it takes two seconds; within an hour I might get the answer back, and then I act on that. My thought has turned into action in one hour, whereas it used to take two, three, five weeks. The speed at which we comprehend something changes everything—these are calculations in healing, in creation. But people, you have to grasp how extraordinarily powerful you are, and how many of the choices you make are choices to slow down the realization of your own power.

I could stay with this overview all day, but I want to shift now to the application of what I’m saying.

I’m going to ask you a question worth really reflecting on—not just thinking about, but reflecting upon. Thomas Merton once posed the question: is it possible to live the whole of your life without ever knowing the person who is living your life? I’ll ask it again: is it possible to live the whole of your life without ever knowing the person who’s living your life? I’ve come across cosmic-sized questions before, but rarely one that actually makes me put something down and just sit there for hours.

In this era, where we emphasize becoming conscious about ourselves—what does it mean to know yourself? If I asked you that, what would you say? Would you tell me your habits? Your occupation? But is that really knowing yourself? Teresa of Ávila said that the journey to self-knowledge is the only worthy journey to make in this life, and that the only real currency is truth and love. Truth and love.

What I think is happening in a greater sphere—and none of us will live to see this come to fruition—is that we are living at the beginning of a tsunami of spiritual influence meant to direct us to the creative authority of our soul: who is living my life? What is directing me? Am I being directed by habit, or am I being directed by something from within that says, “I simply want to experience being alive every day of my life”? Look at the difference.

I taught Sacred Contracts for many years. Right now I’m deeply involved in writing a book about—it’s strange—not so much my own life, but the experiences that caused me to want to teach, and that have influenced what I teach. I’m writing the section now on archetypes—not about what I did in Sacred Contracts, but about the archetypal level of consciousness itself: what is the purpose of that level of consciousness?

When I ask you, “How well do you know yourself?” I’m asking: do I know my myths? Do I know the patterns of consciousness in this extraordinary universe I’m connected to? Do I understand why I feel compelled to teach in this lifetime? I look at people working out in the gym and think, “I would like to do that,” but there isn’t one part of my wiring—not one cell—that finds working out the least bit appealing. I can do it, but one of my closest friends is deeply into yoga; she goes to a yoga class every morning, and if I could send my energy along with her, I would. But for me, it would be: she comes back energized and in love with it, and I come back thinking, “I need some coffee.” That’s the difference.

When I say, “Do you know yourself?” I mean: do you know your archetypal patterns, and beyond that, why do you have this pattern and not that one? Have you ever gotten to a place where you decide, “I am going to accept the package my life came in—I’m not going to fight it, I’m not going to diminish it, I am never again going to get up and say, ‘Is that all there is?'”

I am the engine of this. I want to live at a higher spiritual altitude. Here’s another Merton line: “This day will never come again.” I know it sounds simple, but to expand your consciousness is to actually get into the power of that teaching. I will never again see this sunset or that sunrise. I will never again have this opportunity. I may teach you again, but the elements will be different, the subject will be different, I will be different. This will never come again. That deep inner theology helps you realize that every day of life is precious goods.

One of the many things I learned as a medical intuitive, which blew me away, is this: when I started out, like so many people, I really thought that stress and illness were caused by big events—”I was abandoned,” “I was this,” “I was that.” But as the years went by, I saw there was a tremendous difference between what causes us pain and what causes us suffering and breakdown. That breaking-down process comes from a lack of understanding of our own power—how powerful our thoughts are, how we tell ourselves things that are not true, like “There’s nothing I can do about that.” It comes from how we relinquish our power and authority to something outside ourselves—”I must have approval here, I must have approval there.” I witnessed, as a medical intuitive, that these are the kinds of things you’d never list if a doctor asked, “Why are you suffering?” But the truth is: “Because I need someone’s approval, and I am hemorrhaging my energy.”

Someday, our medical profiles might be precise enough to include our psychic, archetypal activity and how that feeds into our health. Our physical body is the caboose on the train of our life, not the engine. This moment is about all of us—about humanity being directed to move to the engine of our trains, so that we take charge of the power of our beliefs, understand how powerful we are, and can never again blame someone else for why things happen as they do. As we do that, we start listening to our intuitive nature—we understand that’s guidance—because how we understand God is also evolving into a vastly more extraordinary understanding.

For centuries, we’ve lived with the idea of an off-planet, male God—whether we’re talking about Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, or Jesus and the Messiah. Except for Buddhism—and Hinduism has its own version—if we look at the Abrahamic religions, which have had such a force in forming Europe and the Western world, there’s this sense of an off-planet God, a being out there somewhere. Many people are uncomfortable around the word “God”—too bad, I say it all the time—and they’ll say, “Well, I know there’s something, but…” and they stay detached, which is unbelievable to me.

I think that whole way of understanding God has become obsolete. It’s not sufficient and it’s not accurate. What it’s being replaced by is a kind of organic divinity, in which we recognize that we are actually using the life force that’s in this universe—that this life force is all there is, and it is a benevolent force that reveals itself as light, as conscious light, and that it’s the force we use in our cell tissue, the force that heals, the force our intuitive system speaks to. It speaks to us intuitively that the nature of God is love, light, and law.

I think we’re evolving toward a place where this very universal, impersonal understanding of the nature of God—impersonal because law is impersonal by its very nature, like gravity: you jump, you fall, there it is—coexists with something I’ve realized through my own spirituality, and also as a medical intuitive: that this universe is remarkably intimate. I can’t fully explain it. All I know is what I’ve witnessed and what I deeply believe: that this journey we’re sharing is a journey toward drawing us inward, so that we become more aware not just of the power we have, but the power that we are—so that we start living mystical truth. What is in the one is in the whole. What I do to the least person, I am doing to myself, I am doing to everyone. I can’t do mystical mathematics, but I try my best to live that.

As simple as this practice might sound: whenever I walk my dog, whenever I walk the neighborhood—even today, walking her to the groomer—I make it a practice to acknowledge every single person I pass, just by saying “hello,” “good afternoon,” “good evening,” whatever it is. I don’t ignore a human being anymore, because I think of it now as ignoring one of my own cell tissue. And I will tell you the truth: every single person has responded—maybe not dramatically, but everyone breaks into a smile, or some kind of grace is generated when you recognize another person.

As you come to think of yourself as an active, co-creative agent—a soul in a body—your soul is enormous; your body dwells within your soul’s bubble, not the other way around. Growing up Catholic, it was always the soul that was somewhere in there, maybe this big, maybe that big—who knows—and when you die, it goes “poof,” and either reaps its rewards or goes to hell. But they were onto something: that we are eternal beings, here on a life adventure, and that we owe it to ourselves to unravel the mystery and the power of our own life. How we decide to use our power is the one journey we’re all on: to shift from our love of physical power to realizing the power of love, and how we can change the world through that.

There’s a reason people have this burning compulsion inside them to make a difference in the world, to be recognized, to be seen, to be heard. That’s how our ego interprets the deeper sense of “give something to the world, make a difference”—but the way our ego hears it is, “I’ve got to be seen, I’ve got to be noticed, I can’t be ignored.” At a deeper level, where it really matters, it’s the urging of your soul saying, “Let me get in there and do something.”

All of the changes we’re experiencing generate a lot of fear, because we know this collectively—just as we all received the message of holism, we all get the message that somehow we’re participating in our own reality. We don’t yet think of it as co-creating the whole; we still limit it to ourselves. But it’s time to realize: wait a minute, I’m a participant in all of this. This remarkable era requires us to reckon with how fear paralyzes us and blocks us from our two power currencies: truth and love. Truth and love—these are our power currencies.

Part of the practice I want to leave you with—I can’t believe we’ve been talking for an hour—is a set of questions I’ll get to Tami so she can send them out to you. They go like this: What shall I do with my life today? How shall I be of service? And when you ask a question like that, I want you to transfer it to everything you do, so you don’t measure your value by what you do, or what you have, or whether you’re in a homeless shelter or at home working in your office. Instead, you realize: I’m going to involve my soul in this. So whatever I do, I do with a blessing—so that it is of service to others, no matter what. That includes, for me, limiting how much I watch the news, because I don’t like the person I become when I watch it—and you wouldn’t like her either. I think I am of greater service when I go into prayer instead of into worry.

I have no idea what’s going on in the world. I have no idea what’s happening—it’s going through a faster speed of change than we’ve seen. My way to participate is to sit back and pray for the highest good everywhere.

Here’s another question: how should I treat others? With the awareness that I’ll be held accountable for everything I think, everything I see, everything I do, and every way I treat someone—and they’ll be held accountable too. A mystical truth is that we have to account for all the energy we use in our life. There’s no judgment in this—it’s not “shame on you, you should have done this.” It’s rather about what you do with this gift of life, and the life force you use, down to the tiniest breath—we see every single molecule of energy that was required, and that we used.

I want to give you that as a high mystical truth: this universe is vastly enormous—who knows how big—and we don’t comprehend infinite. But what is absolutely true is that we’re living at a profound time of revelation, where we’re realizing that how we understood ourselves was inadequate—that we never included in our description of what a human being is the energetic anatomy system, the psychic field, the energy field, the resources of the human being. We never included that we live in a galactic universe where energy is constantly pouring through, or that we are intuitive and highly attuned to each other—and that this intuitive ability is meant to be a way for us to sense another person and then ask, “What do you want me to do to help them?”

This is why, when I wrote Invisible Acts of Power, it blew me away—I became even more attuned to people on the street, to homeless people, and to how far people will go to avoid meeting their eyes, avoid any kind of contact—because they intuitively sense that. That’s how we turn down our own intuition; we start monkeying around with our wiring.

What I’m saying is that part of going to spiritual home base is that you start treating yourself as a very awake, active intuitive who senses your world as well as sees it. When you feel waves of depression or anxiety—and I’ll go into this more in a future class on psychic and energetic health, spiritual health practices—don’t always assume that the energetic malaise you feel is coming from your own life. You are part of an inner-net, and we are picking up the anxiety of the collective. We’ll explore that in detail in our next class; I don’t want to open that up right now.

My last point—I’m not quite done—is that I really ask you to have prayer time for yourself: to do something where, in the hardness of your soul, you acknowledge that you’re not alone in this universe, and that you are looked after. Just keep that in mind. Okay?

Tami Simon: Thank you so much, Caroline. I think I can say, on behalf of all of us here, a huge thank you.

Caroline Myss: My pleasure.

Tami Simon: All right. Well, very good. We have people who wrote in with some terrific questions. We have Aaron, who’s here to join us and ask her question. Aaron, you can go ahead and unmute yourself and show us your camera.

Caroline Myss: Aaron.

Aaron: Yes, yes, it’s Aaron. Thank you so much to both of you—you have made such a huge difference in my life.

Caroline Myss: Where are you?

Aaron: I live in Green Valley, Arizona, south of Tucson.

Caroline Myss: Okay.

Aaron: My question, or my observation, is that I hemorrhage my power when I identify as a victim, and I catch myself blaming others for my pain.

Tami Simon: Mm-hmm.

Aaron: And I ask myself if I want to lose my soul over this, and I say no, I don’t want to—but I find that the cycle repeats numerous times throughout the day.

Caroline Myss: Well, why do you think it repeats, Aaron? Because you must be doing something to repeat it. So what is it?

Aaron: I’m thinking sad thoughts—thinking that I’ve been betrayed. And if I’m not thinking about that, I’m criticizing myself, or I’m feeling angry. I just catch myself having feelings that aren’t promoting a sense of happiness or peace.

Caroline Myss: Okay. What you’re describing, while it’s your own personal and unique experience, is very common to many people—that’s number one. Number two: because this is an archetypal pattern, what’s true is that we go through a stage where our wounded child, our victim, wants to be recognized for our pain. We want our pain recognized, and so we often wear it—in our mood, in our face. “How are you?” “Oh, you know…” We wear it that way, because the idea of instead saying, “Wait a minute, what expectations did I have that they didn’t fill?”—when you describe something as a betrayal, I don’t need the facts, but often what’s the case is that when someone lets us down, we think they got up and plotted to do it. We don’t realize the spontaneous dynamic in other people’s lives. I’ll bet you anything these people did not get up and say, “Is today the day we hurt her?” I’ll bet you anything it was far more organic. I’m not diminishing your pain, but part of the reason we don’t heal is that we don’t want to widen the lens and see it from the observation deck—because that releases us from the voice of the victim in ourselves. What we’re really hoping for is that people say, “What’s the matter?” and step in and start taking charge of part of our life. Do you relate to that? And never agree with me unless it feels right—that’s my rule. Don’t you dare agree with me out of politeness.

Aaron: It does ring true. I spend a lot of time alone, so I’m not looking for other people to rush in and pay attention to my sadness. I don’t share my sadness with the people I have issues with. I grew up as an only child, so I have this “by myself” kind of thing.

Caroline Myss: Yeah, yeah.

Aaron: But that really hit—that people aren’t plotting to cause me pain. No, they’re not. They’re just living their lives, and I’m just collateral.

Caroline Myss: No, no, no—you’re not collateral. I’m not going to let you use that word. They’re living their lives, but they have no idea how important their lives were to you. Let me rephrase: they had no idea how much they meant. If it would be possible for you to say to them—I don’t know who they are, I don’t know if this is a sibling, I don’t know what it is—but if it was possible for you to say, “I just want to tell you, you mean a lot to me,” if the situation could accommodate it: instead of reaching out to them with your victim, reach out with your heart.

Aaron: Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Caroline Myss: I feel like I want to hug you.

Aaron: Oh, thank you. Well, you have—with your wisdom. I’m just blown away. Really blown away. Thank you so much.

Caroline Myss: Thank you.

Tami Simon: We have a written question here, Caroline. This person writes in: “Elizabeth—I grew up in a Dutch, very skeptical and Catholic household, with an image of a punishing God, until I met you through Anatomy of the Spirit. What I want to ask is: how do I integrate the image of the God I grew up with, with the one you talk and write about all the time—the loving God?”

Caroline Myss: Well, you know, the boogeyman God—I don’t know what happened to me, because I grew up with that same kind of nonsense, and one day I just said, “This is garbage,” and detached from it. The only thing that made sense to me was that the energy we call love is what God feels like, and it’s what God wants us to share with all life. Anytime you hear those voices from the past—and so many people struggle with this—close your eyes and say, “Shut up,” and just keep going, and say, “Download me with grace, God. Just download me with that wonderful grace of love.” God is not energy. God is grace, and grace is light. What we call energy is simply what we say when we don’t want to use a sacred word to describe the power of God.4

Tami Simon: Okay, we have Donna next, who’s going to bring her question forward. Donna, you can turn your camera and your microphone on. There you are—you’re with us.

Caroline Myss: Hi, you.

Donna: Hi. How are you?

Caroline Myss: How are you? Oh, it’s so good to see you. What can I do for you, my dear friend?

Donna: This is a little bit in reference to the last class—you talked about the bubble, and that was really great to have that image. I could sense the losing of energy, particularly with anger or power struggles. But what came up for me was that the last couple of weeks I’ve been having a lot of grief emerge, and when that grief comes—sometimes it’s connected to something that’s reminded me, and sometimes it just erupts and I don’t know where it’s coming from. Sometimes that also feels like losing energy, or even more of a collapse of the bubble. So I wanted to ask about that.

Caroline Myss: Our energy field is alive and moving, and sometimes we don’t know what kind of thought-form can come through and pierce it. You have to remember that in our soul, in our bubble, all the laws of the universe are constantly at work—action and reaction, cause and effect, magnetic attraction, sensation, all the laws, constantly. We’re like sparks, constantly sparking.

Tami Simon: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Myss: And sometimes we collide with other sparks.

Tami Simon: Okay.

Caroline Myss: And sometimes—I really believe this—our healing team, our angels, take advantage of our strengths to clear out a weakness. Just when we’re feeling really energetic, we get blasted, and we’re not sure how—but in fact, it’s because we have so much strength in that moment that we can withstand an extraction. I’ll describe this in much greater detail another time, but I also think we amass a lot of sorrow and sadness, and it comes out in measured doses.

Donna: Okay. Yeah. Yep.

Caroline Myss: I think so often we believe that when we’re sad, we have to do something about it—we have to remedy it. Sometimes that’s the case, but oftentimes there’s just that sorrow, the recognition that something is finished, or something is over, or there was nothing we could do, or it was just difficult. Sometimes we simply have to cry it through.

Donna: Yes.

Caroline Myss: But the good thing, Donna, is that you sense when you’re hemorrhaging—you can feel when you’re losing that power. And, as I’ll emphasize in the weeks and months ahead as we study this together: that’s when you stop, whatever you’re doing, and ask, “Why do I feel this way?” My stomach is alerting me that I’m hemorrhaging, or my lower back is alerting me—I have an ache here, so I need to check in on what’s going on.

Donna: Right, right.

Caroline Myss: How’s your daughter? Okay, okay. I’ll expect a card from you.

Donna: I’m sending a letter soon. Yes.

Caroline Myss: Got it. I appreciate it. Okay.

Tami Simon: We have another written question, from Rene, who writes: “I’m a mother of two teenagers. Although they have an awareness of world religions, they’ve had no formal religious teaching or upbringing. I’m now wondering if I have facilitated a spiritual void in their lives. This is a recent concern for me, after hearing about some of their peers making their confirmation.”

Caroline Myss: You did facilitate a void—there’s no way to say otherwise. My counsel, if I were your spiritual director, would be to ask: what was your reason for not introducing your children to the idea that they were under the protection of a holy power? If you say you’re just angry, that you don’t believe in the church, I don’t accept that as an answer. Even God doesn’t go to church. I no longer accept those kinds of answers as more than avoidance. There’s nothing greater you can give kids than the power of faith, because it becomes faith in themselves, faith in their own gut instincts, and faith that there’s meaning and purpose to life. They don’t become adults who spend the rest of their lives searching for meaning and purpose, because they grow up woven into it.

Tami Simon: Well, Caroline, just to clarify—because somebody wrote into the chat this evening—how do I teach my six-year-old grandson to pray?

Caroline Myss: By example. It’s what’s sometimes called the habits of the heart5—the deepest habits of the heart, which are learned not intellectually, but through example. So pray with your grandson. Don’t talk to him about it—show it.

Tami Simon: Stephanie, you’re next.

Stephanie: Okay. All right. Hello? Hi, can you hear me?

Caroline Myss: Where are you?

Stephanie: I’m in Ohio.

Caroline Myss: Okay.

Stephanie: So my question is—you teach us the analogy that our body is a building, and the penthouse is where we have a higher perspective. You talked about it earlier, as far as your own ability not to look at the news—how do I not plummet to the first floor?

Caroline Myss: You know, like I said tonight, opening with the observation deck—it’s that it gives you a sense of energetic flow. This is what humanity has to go through in order to recalibrate, to become a more humane species. We are not humane—we are not kind to each other. We are kind one-on-one, but our policies, our actions, our systems are going through a cleansing, because we simply aren’t living the mystical truth that we are all connected to each other.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

Caroline Myss: And it’s so hard to endure. When we’re on the ground and we look at Gaza, or we look at Ukraine—I look at that, and then I lean back and say, in my heart, “This is your world, not mine, God. I’m here for a period of time. I will do everything I can not to participate in what makes someone want to go to war. I will do everything I can, with my life, to be an agent of love and change.”

Tami Simon: Hmm.

Caroline Myss: You’ve put us here now, because this is where we belong—so I’m supposed to participate, and I refuse to stay on the first floor and just say, “Oh, these horrible people,” because that’s just not true. It’s like an addict: when an addict needs money, they’re not fussy about whose purse they steal from. When a time comes to erupt—fascism has come here; it could have gone somewhere else. It’s our turn. It’s not a personal universe, but how we respond is personal.

Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Caroline Myss: And really, let the suffering of others draw compassion from you. I can’t rush to you with blankets and books and bandages, but from my distance, I can shine a light and let God take care, and send an angel. Let the angels do the work.

Stephanie: Okay? Okay.

Tami Simon: All right, Caroline, we’ll make this the last live question. I’m not sure I’m saying your name correctly—maybe you can introduce yourself and let us know where you’re from.

Guest (name unclear in recording):6 Hello. Thank you. I am—[name unclear].

Caroline Myss: Beautiful name. Where are you?

Guest: I’m in Mexico. I’m Mexican.

Caroline Myss: Okay.

Guest: Not in Mexico City, of course, but I’m here.

Caroline Myss: Lovely to meet you.

Guest: Me too—it’s very nice being here. I’m going to read my question, because English isn’t my mother tongue, so I won’t make many mistakes.

Caroline Myss: You’re doing beautifully.

Guest: How can I stay calm when I am afraid of ending up alone? I’ve decided not to have children, and it’s hard for me to imagine being married. So I really want to be of service to people, and I meditate every day, to feel a connection with a creative or spiritual force, and I want to learn healing work also. But I’m aware that avoiding loneliness shouldn’t be my motivation for channeling an idea, or saints, or galactic things, or whoever. I don’t want my motivation to be that I need proof that in the end I won’t be alone.

Caroline Myss: Well, I can’t help with that, but I can tell you this—have you ever taken out an advertisement to meet a good friend? Like, “I need a best friend now”? Did you take an ad out in the newspaper for that?

Guest: Um—

Caroline Myss: Are you an only child?

Guest: No.

Caroline Myss: Okay. Did you take an ad out in the newspaper—are you an only child?

Guest: No.

Caroline Myss: Okay, so you didn’t advertise for a sibling?

Guest: No.

Caroline Myss: Okay. I hope this sounds absolutely ridiculous, because all the things that matter to us, we never went looking for—we never looked for. So now you’re looking, and you’re thinking, “Oh my God, what if this doesn’t happen?” What you need to do is recognize: that’s just a reptile talking to me. Everyone I’ve ever loved, everyone who’s ever loved me, has just shown up. Has just shown up. So it’s: “God, you’re in charge of when I meet who I meet, when I meet them—it’s all yours, and I am not going to worry about it. Turn it over to God.” I’m not kidding you, because everything—just say, “I’m not going to be alone. That’s preposterous. So fill my heart, God. Fill my heart.” And don’t let it—every time you do that, just go back to the prayer: “Fill my heart.” Not having any of that, because that’s just your insecurity talking. That’s not real. Slap that insecurity down. Don’t pay attention to it. Say, “You’re nuts—I have this great life, I’ve got all this to give. Heaven’s not going to waste you, darling. Heaven’s not going to waste any part of you.”

Guest: That’s beautiful. Thank you.

Caroline Myss: Okay.

Tami Simon: Thank you, Caroline. You ready for one more written question, and then take us home? I think it’s a good one to end on: someone wrote in, “Becoming impersonal and detached feels like becoming non-caring.”

Caroline Myss: Oh, I know—everyone thinks that. That’s absolute nonsense. “Impersonal”—we don’t have the right word for it, but what it means is that you’re looking at an illusion and saying, “I’m onto you. You’re an illusion.” An equivalent would be if you’ve ever listened to someone tell you a story and you knew for a fact it wasn’t true—or someone’s trying to sell you something, saying “this is the most wonderful thing,” and you just let them talk, but you don’t buy it. It doesn’t attach to you. It’s not personal, and it doesn’t feel like you’re not caring—it’s just that none of your energy has gotten wrapped around it. That’s what it means to be impersonal.

I always say to my students, when I’m teaching: “How many of you want my pen?” They laugh, but I want the example to be that foolish, so they have a memory of what it’s like to have an impersonal relationship with my pen. It’s not that they don’t care—it’s that the pen hasn’t attracted their energy in any way, so whether I put the pen here or there doesn’t matter to them. That’s the power of impersonal. It’s not that you don’t care—it’s that you don’t give it power.

Tami Simon: All right, all right, Caroline.

Caroline Myss: All right, I want to end with a prayer—something delicious. This is Hafiz.7

“Ever since happiness heard your name, it’s been running through the streets trying to find you. And several times in the last week, God himself has even come to my door, asking me for your address. Once I said, ‘God, I thought you knew everything—why are you asking me where your lovers live?’ And the Beloved replied, ‘Indeed, how is it I do know everything, but it’s fun playing dumb once in a while, and I love intimate chat and the warmth of your heart’s fire.'”

Maybe we should make this poem into a song and a prayer—I think it has potential. How does this refrain sound? For I know it is truth: ever since happiness heard your name, it’s been running through the streets trying to find you. And several times in the last week, God himself came to my door, so sweetly, asking for your address, wanting the warmth of your heart’s fire. Isn’t that lovely?

Tami Simon: It is, it is. What you said, Caroline, to the last guest, about heaven not wasting you or wasting any of us—I could feel that reverberating through all the Zoom squares.

Caroline Myss: Oh, I just think that’s beautiful. This work means so much to me that I talked Tami into letting me have an evening with all of you just for your questions. So I’ll teach one class, and then a couple of weeks later, we’ll do the questions, and it’ll just be me in dialogue with you, and then the next class. If this—getting you to home base, getting you to where you never, ever have to question your value or your purpose—that, to me, is worth a good life.

Tami Simon: Very well. Thank you, friends. Thanks for being with us.

Caroline Myss: Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, sweetie.

Tami Simon: You’ve been listening to New York Times bestselling author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss, in an excerpt from her opening presentation as an offering to the new Spiritual Home Base online community. Each month, Caroline presents two live sessions, including practices and prayers, and answers live questions. Spiritual Home Base is a resource, a community designed for this accelerated time of change. People are participating from all over the world, and you can learn more and join us at myss.com/spiritual-homebase. I hope to see you there.

The Sounds True Podcast Network.