Synopsis
Why does a "clean-living" person get sick, while a more obvious candidate stays healthy? Why does someone with a fatal illness suddenly become well, while another with a more benign condition dies? InWhy People Don't Heal and How They Can, best-selling author, medical intuitive, and teacher Caroline Myss explores the deep-seated, spiritual causes of illness, and the symbolic lessons that underlie it. "In the 1980s, when the New Age movement was growing like crazy, people began to express a willingness to take responsibility for their illness," says Myss. "We were all convinced that complete recovery of health was just one psychological insight away. Yet after a few years of trying every available healing regimen and publicly sharing the inner wounds of their psyches, people still didn't get well." As frustrated and puzzled as everyone else, Myss privately began to wonder if somehow they were all on the wrong track. Then in 1988 Myss had an experience that made her realize the power that lies in being wounded. "One day, in passing, I introduced a friend of mine to two gentlemen I was talking with," says Myss. "Within two minutes, my friend managed to let these men know that she was an incest survivor. Her admission had nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation we'd been having, and in a flash I realized that she was using her wounds as leverage. She had gotten to the point that she defined herself by a negative experience." Once Myss became attuned to this phenomenon, which she quickly dubbed woundology, she saw it everywhere. "In workshops and in daily life I saw that, rather than working to get beyond their wounds, people were using them as social currency," says Myss. "They were confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds. Who would want to leave that behind? Health never commands so much clout!" It was then that Myss began to challenge the assumption that people always want to heal. Why People Don't Heal and How They Canshows how choosing to stay stuck in woundology often comes at a terrible price: the loss of health. "We are given a finite amount of energy to run our physical bodies, our minds, and our emotions, as well as to manage our external environments," says Myss. "When we choose to siphon off some of this energy to keep negative events in our histories alive, we are robbing that energy from our cell tissue, making ourselves vulnerable to the development of disease." Once this path is seen as the true energy debt that it is, choosing health means choosing to release the weight of the past. Too often, this is something that people just can't or won't do. While the practice of woundology is a common source of illness, personal negativity is not always the cause; as contradictory as it seems, sometimes illness can be the answer to prayer. "Our spiritual development is meant to culminate in an ability to see things impersonally, to recognize the greater meaning of life's challenges apart from the literal events," says Myss. "To that end, illness can physically guide us onto a path of insight and learning upon which we would otherwise never have set foot. It is an unparallelled catalyst for expanding personal consciousness." Why People Don't Healdetails the intended path of one's spiritual evolution, asserting that it is a microcos