Caroline Myss (pronounced mace; born December 2, 1952) is an American author of 10 books and many audio recordings about mysticism and wellness. She is most well-known for publishing Anatomy of the Spirit (1996). She also co-published The Creation of Health with Dr C Norman Shealy MD – ex-Harvard professor of neurology. Her most recent book, Archetypes: Who Are You? was published in 2013. Myss describes herself as a medical intuitive and a mystic. She was on The Oprah Winfrey Show several times including her 2002 appearance. In 2001 she hosted a TV series titled The Journey With Caroline Myss on the Oxygen (TV network), co-owned by Oprah Winfrey, exploring the spiritual and psychological roadblocks of life in an intimate workshop setting. The TV Specials “Three Levels of Power & How to Use Them” and “Why People Don’t Heal & How They Can,” are based on her work. Her work has been criticized by some as being unsubstantiated and pseudoscientific.
Caroline Myss Quotes
1. “Always go with the choice that scares you the most, because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you. Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?”
— Caroline Myss
2. “Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.”
— Caroline Myss
3. “The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.”
— Caroline Myss
4. “To love yourself, truly love yourself, is to finally discover the essence of personal courage, self-respect, integrity, and self-esteem. These are the qualities of grace that come directly from a soul with stamina.”
— Caroline Myss
5. “Keep the focus of your life in the here and now.”
— Caroline Myss
6. “Live one day at a time. Keep your attention in the present time. Have no expectations. Make no judgments. And give up the need to know why things happen as they do. Give it up!”
— Caroline Myss
7. “Intention without action is useless.”
— Caroline Myss
8. “The dark night of the soul is a journey into light, a journey from your darkness into the strength and hidden resources of your soul.”
— Caroline Myss
9. “Never blame another person for your personal choices – you are still the one who must live out the consequences of your choices.”
— Caroline Myss
10. “The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you’re seeing God clearly.”
— Caroline Myss
11. “If you have life, you have purpose.”
— Caroline Myss
12. “People suffer when they pursue a life or chase a dream that doesn’t belong to them.”
— Caroline Myss
13. “When you do not seek or need approval, you are at your most powerful.”
— Caroline Myss
14. “Self-love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us – for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us, they hurt only us.”
— Caroline Myss
15. “The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that’s why when one has become a forgiving person and has managed to let go of the past, what they’ve really done is they’ve shifted their relationship with time.”
— Caroline Myss
16. “Perfectionism is the fear of being criticized.”
— Caroline Myss
17. “It’s easy to get lost in endless speculation. So today, release the need to know why things happen as they do. Instead, ask for the insight to recognize what you’re meant to learn.”
— Caroline Myss
18. “I would remind people that this day of your life will never come again. Do not use one day of your life carelessly. It will never come again. You’ll never see the person you’re sitting across from in that light or in that way. You will never see the sunset twice. This day will never come again.”
— Caroline Myss
19. “Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body – your thoughts, your actions, your food – the thing you feed your life.”
— Caroline Myss
20. “Your body is your own planet Earth.”
— Caroline Myss
21. “If you don’t appreciate what you have in life right now, whatever it is, you will never realize your purpose. Without appreciation, you will never become strong enough to respect yourself.”
— Caroline Myss
22. “Fate is how your life unfolds when you let fear determine your choices. A path of destiny reveals itself to you, however, when you confront your fear and make conscious choices.”
— Caroline Myss
23. “Forgive and call back the energy wasted on past events.”
— Caroline Myss
24. “Healing is a different type of pain. It’s the pain of becoming aware of the power of one’s strength and weakness, of one’s capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself.”
— Caroline Myss
25. “Every life has a purpose. We need to let go of the past. Live in the present. Do not waste today worrying about what will happen tomorrow. Embrace your true spirit, embrace and listen to grace and you be transformed in the moment. Do not fixate on what you want but give thanks for what you have.”
— Caroline Myss
26. “Managing the power of choice, with all its creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience.”
— Caroline Myss
27. “Grant me the grace to dissolve my negative thoughts about myself today. I breathe the grace of kindness into my heart. And may the grace of healing flow abundantly to everyone in need of help.”
— Caroline Myss
28. “Choice is your greatest power. It is an even greater power than love because you must first choose to be a loving person.”
— Caroline Myss
29. “Faith is the power to stand up to the madness and chaos of the physical world while holding the position that nothing external has any authority over what heaven has in mind for you.”
— Caroline Myss
30. “We evolve at the rate of the tribe we are plugged into.”
— Caroline Myss
31. “Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force – and of the other person’s.”
— Caroline Myss
32. “Get bored with your past, it’s over!”
— Caroline Myss
33. “Silence is a learned practice that requires far more than just not talking. Not talking is not silence; it’s just not talking.”
— Caroline Myss
34. “The spirit for me is the eternal self. And when one incarnates, an aspect comes with that incarnation, that’s called the soul. And together the mind, the emotional body, and the soul form the energy field that lives within this thing called the human body.”
— Caroline Myss
35. “What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.”
— Caroline Myss
36. “Our lives change externally as we change internally.”
— Caroline Myss
37. “To heal illness, begin by restoring balance.”
— Caroline Myss
38. “Seeing and admitting the truth about ourselves, about our role in creating our own problems, and about how we relate to others is vital for healing.”
— Caroline Myss
39. “It is our nature to defy gravity, to transcend the limitations of the reasoning mind and connect with the realm of the mystical truth.”
— Caroline Myss
40. “Power is at the root of the human experience. Our attitudes and beliefs – positive or negative – are all extensions of how we define and use power.”
— Caroline Myss
41. “We have converted our wounds into a type of relationship currency that we use in order to control situations and people.”
— Caroline Myss
42. “While we measure our own success in terms of our personal comfort and security, the universe measures our success by how much we have learned.”
— Caroline Myss
43. “Let me give up the need to know why things happen as they do. I will never know and constant wondering is constant suffering.”
— Caroline Myss
44. “Whatever is in me is stronger than what is out there to defeat me.”
— Caroline Myss
45. “Your biography becomes your biology.”
— Caroline Myss
46. “Keep your honor code between you and God, you don’t break that, no matter who’s not looking. God is.”
— Caroline Myss
47. “You will always receive help within a second of a prayer. To recognize the help, you must see everything in your life from that second on as a part of the answer to your prayer.”
— Caroline Myss
48. “Healing is, by definition, taking a process of disintegration of life and transforming into a process of return to life.”
— Caroline Myss
49. “People around the world are confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds.”
— Caroline Myss
50. “You cannot change anything in your life with intention alone, which can become a watered-down, occasional hope that you’ll get to tomorrow. Intention without action is useless.”
— Caroline Myss
51. “The empowerment journey that is critical to your healing – and to your life – comes from progressing through the deep waters of your dark passions and continuing onward to discover not what has been taken from you, but what you have yet to give and who you have yet to become.”
— Caroline Myss
52. “The more conscious we become the more consciously we choose that which we set in motion to create.”
— Caroline Myss
53. “It is not what we choose that is important; it is the reason we choose it.”
— Caroline Myss
54. “Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?”
— Caroline Myss
55. “Becoming internally empowered shifts a person’s center of gravity from external to internal- a mark of spiritual passage.”
— Caroline Myss
56. “Always go with the choice that scares you the most, because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you.”
— Caroline Myss
57. “Be consistent and live what you believe.”
— Caroline Myss
58. “Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.”
— Caroline Myss
59. “Forgiveness is no longer an option but a necessity for healing.”
— Caroline Myss
60. “You have resources yet to be unleashed. Make bold, courageous choices. Live as though you have the power to change the world – because you do.”
— Caroline Myss
61. “Forgiveness is a mystical act, not a reasonable one.”
— Caroline Myss
62. “Grace is a power that comes in and transforms a moment into something better.”
— Caroline Myss
63. “It is your birthright to discover your sacred contract. It will guide you to find your divine destiny.”
— Caroline Myss
64. “Intuition is a natural by-product of flowering of a mature self-esteem and a sense of empowerment – not power over, but power to be.”
— Caroline Myss
65. “From a spiritual perspective every relationship we develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves the purpose of helping us to become more conscious.”
— Caroline Myss
66. “If anyone tries to complicate your life, turn and walk away from them.”
— Caroline Myss
67. “Forgiveness, quite frankly, is the most selfish thing you can do. Because it is the greatest thing you can do for yourself.”
— Caroline Myss
68. “A breakthrough occurs when you recognize, you are more energy than matter.”
— Caroline Myss
69. “Knowing that every single day is so filled with potential – you cannot wait for life to give you anything. You have no right to feel entitled. You are not entitled to anything.”
— Caroline Myss
70. “Through the years of my life, the older I’ve gotten, the more sensitive I’ve become to the suffering of people and to my inability to really fix that. I wish that proportion was different. I wish I could help more. Unfortunately, that’s not how the equation is working out here.”
— Caroline Myss
71. “Healing requires taking action-it is not a passive event.”
— Caroline Myss
72. “The reason you have descended into physical life is to unleash the power of your soul upon Earth.”
— Caroline Myss
73. “So long as we use comfort and security as our criteria of success, we will fear our own intuitive guidance because by its very nature it directs us into new cycles of learning that are sometimes uncomfortable.”
— Caroline Myss
74. “You don’t need a wishbone, you need a backbone.”
— Caroline Myss
75. “By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. Forgiveness is no longer an option but a necessity for healing.”
— Caroline Myss
76. “Every choice we make contains the energy of either faith or fear, and the outcome of every decision reflects to some extent that faith or fear. This dynamic of choice guarantees that we cannot run away from ourselves or our decisions.”
— Caroline Myss
77. “Healing comes from gathering wisdom from past actions and letting go of the pain that the education cost you.”
— Caroline Myss
78. “A soulmate is the person who makes your soul grow the most.”
— Caroline Myss
79. “Between thinking and seeing, there is a place called knowing.”
— Caroline Myss
80. “How would your life change if your self-esteem improved?”
— Caroline Myss
81. “I have to trust that there is a force greater than me that also knows and sees this, and breathes with it and knows that it’s part of a grander plan, and all the good things people do matter.”
— Caroline Myss
82. “Follow your pain as if it were a candle in the night, leading you to a place of decision.”
— Caroline Myss
83. “Women most certainly carry a more sympathetic heart in the traditional, classic sense of the mother archetype. They have been given the role to carry the heart energy of the human community, whereas men carry the survival energy.”
— Caroline Myss
84. “Spiritual maturity is measured not by the sophistication of a person’s opinions, but by their genuineness and the courage necessary to express and maintain them.”
— Caroline Myss
85. “I love myself enough-not in a schmaltzy garbage sense, Hallmark stuff, I’m talking respect myself-I respect my life force enough to no longer waste it.”
— Caroline Myss
86. “Developing personal power includes learning not to negotiate your self-worth for the sake of someone else or sell yourself short for a job.”
— Caroline Myss
87. “Master your responses to external events – don’t attempt to control them.”
— Caroline Myss
88. “The journey of consciousness, of mysticism, is to come to know yourself and your own motivations.”
— Caroline Myss
89. “Become mindful that remaining in a conflict is a choice.”
— Caroline Myss
90. “To believe in an invisible order, a divine or implicate order, as quantum physics calls it, or the order beneath the disorder that chaos theory describes, is a healthier, more interesting choice than seeing no meaning in life whatsoever.”
— Caroline Myss
91. “Life was never meant to be safe. It was meant to be lived right to the end.”
— Caroline Myss
92. “Belief in oneself is required for healing.”
— Caroline Myss
93. “We are actually more afraid of change than we are of death.”
— Caroline Myss
94. “Spirituality on the other hand, is a chosen path of developing intimate relationships with God. It’s chosen, it’s nurtured, and it’s optional.”
— Caroline Myss
95. “Sometimes the elements of our life present us with a challenge that is an initiation in disguise, a fire walk that burns your lower nature right out of you so that you are able to adapt to a higher level of consciousness.”
— Caroline Myss
96. “We are also very presumptuous to negate the possibility that an illness may be a gift. It’s a neutral experience is what I’m trying to say. It should be viewed in some regard as no different than any other experience.”
— Caroline Myss
97. “I do a lot of reflection. I do. I spend a lot of time in reflection and contemplation. I guess the way the old mystics used to do. I don’t do meditation. That’s not for me. It’s not my thing.”
— Caroline Myss
98. “The strings to our past are burned because we need a new beginning.”
— Caroline Myss
99. “Spiritual connection does not mean romance.”
— Caroline Myss
100. “Our goal while on this earth is to transcend our illusions and discover the innate power of our spirit. We are responsible for what we create, and we must therefore learn to act and think with love and wisdom and live in service to others and all life.”
— Caroline Myss
101. “Act on your inner guidance, and give up your need for ‘proof’ that your inner guidance is authentic. The more you ask for proof, the less likely you are to receive any.”
— Caroline Myss
102. “It’s two things: it’s totally impersonal and it’s totally personal, simultaneously. That’s the nature of the mystical experience of life. Everything about life is impersonal, but you have a personal experience. And the bridge between the personal and the impersonal is called prayer.”
— Caroline Myss
103. “Faith in anything, be it positive or negative, produces results. Putting faith in fear generates destructive results, beginning with the disintegration of our ability to relate confidently to the external world.”
— Caroline Myss
104. “Forgiveness is essential to healing because it requires you to surrender your ego’s need to have life fall into place around your personal version of justice.”
— Caroline Myss
105. “It doesn’t matter what you choose, what matters is the energy with which you choose it.”
— Caroline Myss
106. “I think the idea that women have all this wonderful emotion is a myth, as well as the fact that men do not. I mean, people are people. What is happening across the board is the recognition that emotions and the spirit and soul play a fundamental part in the art of healing.”
— Caroline Myss
107. “We are reluctant to live outside tribal rules because we are afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe.”
— Caroline Myss
108. “Guidance requires action, but it does not guarantee safety.”
— Caroline Myss
109. “Becoming adept at the process of self-inquiry and symbolic insight is a vital spiritual task that leads to the growth of faith in oneself.”
— Caroline Myss
110. “The greatest gift you can give another person is strength.”
— Caroline Myss
111. “When you approach intuitive methods with respect, you become open to hearing from your interior channels.”
— Caroline Myss
112. “You never really know how or when your life is going to change, and that’s for the best.”
— Caroline Myss
113. “By learning to identify your energy patterns, you will be able to gain a much greater vision of the meaning and purpose of your many experiences and relationships.”
— Caroline Myss
114. “I think that the practice of medicine, the science of it, has become 50% pharmacological so that doctors are like walking pharmacies.”
— Caroline Myss
115. “In general, if a couple cannot expand their original rules and boundaries to accommodate personal growth, the relationship disintegrates.”
— Caroline Myss
116. “Nothing exists without a purpose. And we humans are subject to the laws of nature just as everything else on earth is.”
— Caroline Myss
117. “Therefore, when you enter into anything, as a frightened being, that contract you make with another person out of fear, has to fall apart.”
— Caroline Myss
118. “Grace is the breath of God – an invisible essence beyond intellect that moves swiftly amongst us. It is not only possible to become a living conduit of this powerful force, grace is immediately accessible to us along with the courage to follow divine guidance.”
— Caroline Myss
119. “Learn to trust what you cannot see far more than what you can see.”
— Caroline Myss
120. “Imagine what a focused human being could do in a day to make a difference in this world.”
— Caroline Myss
121. “Yet the truth is that healing and change are one and the same thing. They are composed of the same energy, and we cannot seek to heal an illness without first looking into what behavioral patterns and attitudes need to be altered in our life. Once those characteristics are identified, we have to do something about those patterns. This requires taking action, and action brings about change.”
— Caroline Myss
122. “There isn’t anything in your life that cannot be changed.”
— Caroline Myss
123. “I think every part of our lives begins at an energetic level. Like creativity. You can’t separate anything from that archetypal process.”
— Caroline Myss
124. “How can you live without knowing what your spirit is doing and what your spirit is saying to you?”
— Caroline Myss
125. “For me, all of the data that is contained in your cell memory, and in your energetic field, is able to be picked up.”
— Caroline Myss
126. “Love is the fuel of our physical and spiritual bodies.”
— Caroline Myss
127. “Achieving the impossible requires that you outwit your voice of reason and access the whimsical part of your nature that inherently delights in the possibilities of the imagination.”
— Caroline Myss
128. “It’s time to learn the truths that govern our interior soul.”
— Caroline Myss
129. “Surrendering the need for an explanation represents a profound act of personal transformation.”
— Caroline Myss
130. “One has a more practical survival level, that’s the mind function. The heart function obviously has an internal level that has to do with the quality of developing perceptions, feelings, the self. And the spirit level has to do with the pondering part of our lives.”
— Caroline Myss
131. “You cannot come to know the depths of the purpose of your life, however, if you are not willing to release those parts of your life that are no longer necessary.”
— Caroline Myss
132. “We do indeed weave our spirit to the events and relationships of our lives. Life is as simple as that.”
— Caroline Myss
133. “The women with high social pressure seem to be amongst the strongest carriers of the possibility of breast cancer.”
— Caroline Myss
134. “I have come to believe that energy medicine is a practice of healing that is dependent upon the energy of time. Whereas allopathic medicine uses linear time as a fundamental healing measure. Energy medicine needs to understand the dynamic of chiros time, that is the time without time.”
— Caroline Myss
135. “I can sense and feel this wretched compassion that I don’t want. But it’s there. It’s a very painful kind of compassion. It’s not the one you look for. You don’t want this kind of compassion; it just happens.”
— Caroline Myss
136. “The spiritual test inherent in all our lives is the challenge to discover what motivates us to make the choices we do, and whether we have faith in our fears or the Divine…”
— Caroline Myss
137. “Energy Anatomy.”
— Caroline Myss
138. “Human reasoning can never answer the mysteries of our lives.”
— Caroline Myss
139. “The goal of the human experience is to transform ourselves from beings who long to attain power in the physical world to beings who are empowered from within.”
— Caroline Myss
140. “Dominant energy patterns that are contributing to the stress in a human being, are able to be picked up if a person is open enough. And for me, as a medical intuitive, that’s where I focus my attention. That’s what the skill is all about.”
— Caroline Myss
141. “Our lives are structured around power symbols: money, authority, title, beauty, security.”
— Caroline Myss
142. “The amount of suffering you actually can feel, you want to be able to do something about it. You want to be able to attend to it, to change the system that is making this happen. Because you are so aware of how unnecessary it is, and therein lies the deeper pain.”
— Caroline Myss
143. “I grew to understand or really grasp a sense of what the power of being humble is – that becomes a practice. Otherwise, you’ll be crushed by your fear of being humiliated. It’ll control you for the rest of your life. I really understood that. I haven’t mastered it, I haven’t come close to it.”
— Caroline Myss
144. “And eternity does not mean everlasting time but a moment without time. Wittgenstein saw it clearly: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” So.”
— Caroline Myss
145. “The Mind, once enlightened, cannot again become dark.” THOMAS PAINE, Common Sense.”
— Caroline Myss
146. “I have yet to meet a person who has not felt betrayed.”
— Caroline Myss
147. “The journey of life is the unification of fragmentation. Fragments are units of power that are out of control. We make agreements to come and collect ourselves.”
— Caroline Myss
148. “Finding the right healing path requires all or nothing. Once you place conditions on healing, all you can achieve is conditional healing.”
— Caroline Myss
149. “Living in harmony with truth means you are not harboring secrets or hiding behind old wounds, not betraying yourself or others.”
— Caroline Myss
150. “Of great significance to me was the realization that “healing” does not always mean that the physical body recovers from an illness. Healing can also mean that one’s spirit has released long-held fears and negative thoughts towards oneself or others. This kind of spiritual release and healing can occur even though one’s body may be dying physically.”
— Caroline Myss
