The following excerpt is taken from the book Defy Gravity by Caroline Myss. It is published by Hay House (October 2009) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com. DEFY GRAVITY:HEALING BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF REASON
Foreword
Brilliance, passion, wit, forensic clarity, and a realistic unshrinking compassion—these are all qualities we have come to expect from the extraordinary work of Caroline Myss, and they are in abundant, vivid and provocative display in her latest book Defy Gravity. What is also remarkable and inspiring about Caroline as a writer, teacher andperson, is that she is continually reinventing herself, constantly pressing forward to a more and more all-encompassing integration of mind, heart, body and soul. For her, this search for the unified force field of truth is never a purely individual one; it takes place in the context of an urgent and radical confrontation with our world crisis that is now threatening the survival of the human race and much of nature, and it is born out of a passionate desire for planetary as well as personal healing.
It is this menacing crisis that is at the secret heart of Defy Gravity. Caroline Myss knows exactly where we are in a vast disaster of our own making, a growing catastrophe engendered by our addiction to and adoration of reason and the powers of control it opens up to us and by our abandonment of the Sacred and the rigorous and exacting mystic laws that govern its application to life. Our survival is threatened on every side—by the demons our passion for domination of each other and of nature have unleashed, by our flawed and tribal understandings of religion that fuel instead of resolving conflict, and by our continuing refusal to face the personal and collective shadows of our greed, fear, cruelty and unacknowledged despair at our untransformed human nature.
In Defy Gravity, Caroline Myss offers us a way out of this nightmare—a way out that she has clearly forged in the core of her own life and a from a lifetime’s wrestling with the problems and possibilities of healing. This way out demands of us that we face two things—that the Age of Enlightenment—the age of the primacy of reason and of purely materialistic and scientific explanations of reality—has now revealed its bankruptcy and cannot offer us any real guidance, and that our greatest resource lies not in our technological wizardry or rational political "solutions" but in the truth of our inner divine nature and its astounding transparence to the divine’s power of transforming grace.
It is this power that Caroline has experienced in the heart of her own life and it is to this ultimate universal divine power that she returns us again and again in different increasingly revelatory ways throughout her new book, challenging all of us to learn the difficult lessons of humility, surrender, unconditional forgiveness, understanding of necessary ordeal and of mystical law that ensure its most potent operation.
One of the holiest joys of my life is my deep friendship with Caroline. What characterizes Caroline as a friend and as a sacred friend now to all of you in the pages of Defy Gravity is her startling nakedness of soul, her unwillingness to let herself or anyone else off the hook of examining our darkest passions and the robust kindness and strong generosity of encouraging compassion that radiate from her hard-won knowledge both of human frailty and of the possibilities to transmute and transform that frailty. One of the things I admire most about this wonderful book is that in it I hear constantly the intimate voice of the soul-sister I know and love, speaking here from the full range of herself, and in a way that is at once humble and exalted, fierce and consoling. A voice as varied, clear and radical as Caroline’s is rare in any culture: in our culture of denial, confusion, muddy and sophomoric spiritual and political correctness it is of unique value. What it offers— even as it exposes our fantasies, addictions and perversities—is a faith and witness we can believe in because they have been forged both from heartbreak at the state of the world and from radical experience of their potentially all-transforming power of Divine Love and Wisdom.
What Defy Gravity also gives us—and this is, I believe, its greatest grace to us— an extremely clear archetypal template for both inner and outer healing, one that distills for a vast audience and in contemporary language the difficult truths of universal mysticism. Caroline has found an utterly modern and timely way of describing for us the essential healing journey enshrined at the heart of the world’s major mystical traditions. This journey at once demands us to transcend our ‘unreasonable’ rational claims of personal security, safety and control and to travel through sometimes extremely painful zones of surrender, unconditional forgiveness, unillusioned confrontation with our own dark passions so as to discover the great gifts of soul, passion, power and knowledge that are born in us when we enter into our own deepest divine identity. There is nothing easy or consoling to the mind or ego about such a journey; but what it offers, as Caroline makes marvelously and methodically clear, is a wholly new evolutionally level of empowerment.
It is this wholly new evolutionary level of empowerment- and so of both inner and outer healing- that our shattering and contemporary crisis is now calling us to. No one has a fiercer sense of "divine paradox" than Caroline—and she makes it clear, that she knows that our modern dark night is potentially the crucible of a birth on an unprecedented scale of healed human beings aligned consciously with cosmic grace and mystical law and so imbued with their essential soul power and destiny. In the journey from our contemporary confusion to the humbled surrendered clarity that can open us to such an evolutionary birth, Caroline Myss’s Defy Gravity will play an indispensable role as guide and radiant torch of hope and possibility.
This is a book to read and savor again and again, to learn from and live by. I’m personally grateful to Caroline for continuing to risk the searing journey that makes such healing visions accessible to her and through her to us. In Entering the Castle, Caroline Myss guided us through the timeless path of wisdom opened up by Theresa of Ávila; in Defy Gravity Caroline claims her own authority as guide and radical mystic pioneer with the humility, intensity and clarity that potentially ennobles us all. - Andrew Harvey
Chapter OneBeyond Reason: Healing in the Age of Energy
You never really know how or when your life is going to change, and that’s for the best. If someone had said to me, "Be on the lookout tonight, Caroline, because someone is going to experience a spontaneous healing in your audience," how would I have reacted? And at whom would I have looked? Would I have cast my attention to the two people in wheelchairs? Would I have looked for a sick child, because that’s got a certain Madonna-and-Child quality to it? Would I have asked for a show of hands to count how many people were ill, just to see how many subjects were in the running? I don’t know what I would have done. But a healing did happen that night while no one was looking.
The evening was part of a tour to promote my new book, Entering the Castle. It was planned as the usual type of tour event, at which I introduce the book, chat about it for a couple of hours, answer some questions, and then autograph copies. But that’s not what happened on this evening. It started out that way, yet as I began to describe the "interior castle,"—the image Saint Teresa of Ávila used to beautifully describe the inner soul—I could tell that my words were not communicating its power or mystical significance. The people in the audience were simply not relating to the seductive power of their souls through words, and it was obvious that all the metaphors and analogies and poetic descriptions would only continue to fall short. In fact, lecturing about the nature of soul grew more frustrating with each passing minute, as I could tell that for my audience, "soul" itself was just a mental concept, a word without an experience attached to it. How could anyone relate to a description of a mystical experience? How could I possibly tell these people to get enthusiastic about a place they had never experienced? Words cannot get you to experience Paris, can they?
I began to realize that my listeners were craving an actual mystical experience, or as close as they could come to one. They didn’t want me to talk about the interior castle; they wanted to enter their own interior castles. I looked at this audience of more than 800 people and thought, "How am I going to do this without prayer?" Teresa was clear in her writings that the only way into one’s interior castle is through prayer and inner devotion. But my experience through the years had consistently been that although audiences were comfortable with meditation, guided imagery, moments of silence, and even terms like the Divine, the Goddess, and the Great Spirit, mention prayer or God and feathers got ruffled. "That’s too Catholic," I have been told on more occasions than you can imagine—and though I’m not exactly a fan of the Vatican, I do come from a Catholic background. As a result, I had never introduced prayer into my workshops, not even moments of silence or meditation.
That evening I had to confront this ironclad policy. I knew that if I simply told my audience, "Close your eyes, sit back, and listen to my words as I lead you into your castle," not only would I be dishonoring everything I knew about the mystical journey, but these eager people would also be denied an opportunity to experience something quite tranquil and authentic within them. I knew that the transformative link that drew a person "out of the mind" and into a altered state of consciousness, however slight and however brief, was prayer and that without prayer, the entire exercise into the castle— this metaphor of the soul—would be no more than a mental visualization. For me, that dishonored the very essence of the mystical experience.
To be clear, I differentiate between what I call a "mystical journey" and a "mystical experience." A mystical journey is an inner exercise scripted with language that is specifically soul-focused. That is, instead of saying, "Relax and breathe into your energy," as I might do in a different kind of guided meditation, I instruct people to
"breathe into a field of grace." I direct them into their "interior castle," their inner soul, through prayer, not relaxation. I use the vocabulary of the soul and the sacred. A mystical experience, on the other hand, cannot be self-initiated. Rather, it is a spontaneous occurrence in which an individual is consumed into an altered state of divine consciousness.
So I told the audience that the journey into the interior castle required prayer and grace—not ordinary prayer, as in prayers of petition or repetition, but the type of prayer that withdraws your attention from external distractions and from your five senses. The audience was more than willing, and so, for the first time in my career, I led 800 people
on their maiden journey into their interior castle.
As I continued the castle meditation exercise, the atmosphere in the room began to change. One way I can describe this is to say that it felt as if everyone had relaxed their shoulders and jaws at the same time. The tension was gone and its absence was palpable. I realize now that the collective sharing of prayer and opening to the experience of channeling grace had created a unified field of grace, generating a mystical atmosphere ripe for the experience of healing. A field of grace emerges when people come together in prayer or for acts of good intention, such as helping others after disasters. You can sense the absence of negativity in a field of grace, for example, and though it may not last long, the sensation that negativity has evaporated is akin to the absence of psychic tension, as if a soft harmonious breeze has filled the room. Everyone settles into an effortless place of calm and without being led into forming a chorus of breathing together, they silently unite into one whole breath. Such is the absence of negativity and rarely do people emerge rapidly from such inner tranquility. They want to reside in this grace as long as they can, not because they recognize it as grace but because for a small second, they are aware that they are experiencing a calmness that is not self-generated or contrived or imagined. It is a calmness that has been bestowed upon them and this is a calmness they will seek to return to again and again.
After the exercise, few wanted to leave their chairs, which is quite something in a room of 800 people. The silence in the room was not an ordinary one, but a soothing, healing silence that had penetrated deeply into the stressful minds and hearts of the audience, and they wanted to remain in this grace-filled quiet for as long as they could.
Finally, I had to begin to sign books, so I thanked everyone, left the stage, and went to the signing table.
Hundreds of people lined up for inscriptions. It’s impossible to have a conversation with everyone, even though I want to because I am so grateful to see each person. Precisely because each person in that line who has bought a book wants to say something to me or ask me a question, there is always a "bad cop," so to speak, someone who gently encourages people to keep moving. On this evening, when I was nearly done, a woman walked up behind me, somehow bypassing the vigilant bad cop, and said, "I’ve suffered with chronic pain for 20 years in my shoulders, my back, and my hands. I’ve never, ever been out of pain in all that time. I don’t know what just happened to me or how it happened, but my pain is gone, and somehow I know it is gone forever. I thought you would want to know that."
She told me this while I was signing a book for someone else. I looked up to see her face. Shimmering with awe, she whispered, "Thank you," and left. I wanted to run after her and ask, "Who are you? Tell me more about what happened," but I couldn’t leave the book-signing table. And then she was gone.
"HEALING IS REAL"
As the book tour continued, so did the healings. Sometimes they were immediate, as at the first event. Other times I received an e-mail from someone who had been at a lecture on Entering the Castle, then noticed that within a week or two or three, a condition that he or she had been coping with for some time was improving—or, in some
cases, completely healed.
The following May, I took the bold step of offering a workshop in Austin, Texas, specifically for people who needed healing. The focus of this workshop was not to teach people about healing but for people who actually needed to be healed. The workshop was built around the teachings of Entering the Castle, as I had realized by then that healings occurred only within those specific workshops. I had reviewed the significant differences between the castle workshops and all the other theme-oriented workshops I’d offered, such as Sacred Contracts, Energy Anatomy, and The Science of Medical Intuition. At first it made no sense to me that the choice of any particular theme could create an atmosphere that somehow became a vessel for healing. Then I realized that the castle workshops were the only ones in which I broke through my own resistance and introduced the element of prayer as the means through which participants gained entry into their interior castle. Prayer draws a response from the Divine, and as I reflected on the relationship between prayer and healing, I realized that one of the many graces available to us through prayer is the grace to heal—a grace that renews our inner physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual vitality. During each of the journeys into the interior castle, I specifically offered a healing prayer, invoking the mystical quality of grace that is capable of melting through illness and shattering the rotting parts of the mind that hold on to old wounds decades past the point when they should be forgiven and forgotten.
The difference was prayer, but not just that I had broken my own rule against praying at a seminar. What mattered was that the workshop participants had broken through their own barriers of "political correctness" or even a kind of social arrogance on occasion that had prevented them from even acknowledging that they needed prayer in their lives. As I am quick to point out in all my workshops and books, I am not speaking about specific religions or any specific kind of prayer; I am especially not speaking about the Roman Catholic tradition of prayer. I have to point that out, because it is widely known that I am Catholic, although I do not write from a Catholic position. Prayer is a power that transcends the politics of any religion, as is the power of God.
At this point in my personal introduction to healing, I realized that healings were actually happening—that such things were not "New Age wishful thinking," as I had so often commented to myself. I determined then that I would always close my workshops with a guided prayer leading the participants into their interior castles for their own healing.
Awe is a hard state to describe. The realization that a room full of people praying within their interior castles—which is to say, praying beyond their boundary of reason— had resulted in actual healings filled me with awe in a way few events in my life ever had; I was truly awestruck. Awe is a marvelous word that has so much more resonance and complexity than its use in the cliché epithet awesome ever allows; it comprises wonder and dread, admiration and trepidation, often at the same time. I was finally witnessing the truth of what I had studied in grad school about mystics and healing, the reality of cosmic laws unfolding, and the way the experience can feel both humbling and exhilarating. That I would now put a sign out reading "Healing Workshop" represented my decision to trust in this awe: to trust that this was not just a passing ship in the night, that this healing grace would flow abundantly no matter who asked, no matter when, no matter where, and that no illness was too great a challenge for the power of grace. Was I really willing to step into those waters? Because even though I absolutely believe that you can be healed unto your final breath, I knew that not everyone would or could be physically healed. I had to ask myself if I had the stamina to cope with the disbelief and disappointed expectations of others who would not reach their goal of recovering their health.
After I sent out the notice of the Austin workshop, I considered what I had done. Perhaps, I thought in a moment of quiet sanity, I had become a bit too ambitious. It’s one thing to teach a subject and watch as the field of grace it creates inspires a healing, but to actively pursue healing is an entirely different matter. You are now openly stating that you personally have access to knowledge that can potentially initiate healing—and that raises the responsibility bar several notches. I needed help, and so I asked a close colleague and friend, Steve Fanning, who is a professor of history as well as a gifted healer, to teach the workshop with me. Years ago Steve ended up bedridden as a result of an asthma attack that left him in an extended coma. The prognosis was that he would never walk again. But Steve healed himself, and through that journey he became a vessel for the healing of others. Within weeks our workshop filled to capacity with people struggling with every kind of ailment, from cancer to advanced diabetes to leukemia to HIV/AIDS.
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