Book Review: Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing

By Caroline Myss

Over the years, I’ve been asked numerous times if I was familiar with Caroline Myss’s work. Inevitably, when I said no, the speaker would tell me, “Oh, you should read her stuff. You would love it!”

Well, the Universe guided me to one of her books a few months ago, and then hid the other book I was reading until I picked up Anatomy of the Spirit and started reading. Then I remembered exactly where my other book was. But it was too late. I was hooked.

Caroline Myss is an acclaimed medical intuitive and motivational speaker. She can “read” illness in a person’s body by scanning their energy field, and most often she can intuit the cause or the source of the dis-ease. She says that “Biography Becomes Biology,” meaning that our stories and how we interpret events that happen in our lives directly affect our physical health, or lack of health. Each of us has the ability to become aware of the source of the energetic leak that is causing the physical challenge, and change how we view events and ourselves in order to facilitate healing.

Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing is a unique look at the chakra system. I say unique because she relates the chakras to the Christian Sacraments and the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, assigns each one a Sacred Truth and shares which areas of the body each one affects.

Here is what she says about the human energy field:

“Everything that is alive pulsates with energy and all of this energy contains information. While it is not surprising that practitioners of alternative or complementary medicine accept this concept, even some quantum physicists acknowledge the existence of an electromagnetic field generated by the body’s biological processes. Scientists accept that the human body generates electricity because living tissue generates energy.”

Medical intuitives can read this energy field along with the emotional energy system which consists of profound and traumatic experiences, memories, belief patterns and attitudes. Myss presents three principles of energy medicine and intuition: biography becomes biology, personal power is necessary for health and you alone can help yourself heal. In her discussion of the relation of spirituality to energy medicine, she states:

“Today many spiritual seekers are trying to infuse their daily lives with a heightened consciousness of the sacred, striving to act as if each of their attitudes expressed their spiritual essence. Such conscious living is an invocation, a request for personal spiritual authority. It represents a dismantling of the old religions’ classic parent-child relationship to God and a move into spiritual adulthood. Spiritual maturation includes not only developing the ability to interpret the deeper messages of sacred texts, but learning to read the spiritual language of the body. As we become more conscious and recognize the impact of our thoughts and attitudes — our internal life — upon our physical bodies and external lives, we no longer need to conceive of an external parent-God that creates for us and on whom we are fully dependent. As spiritual adults we accept responsibility for co-creating our lives and our health. Co-creation is in fact the essence of spiritual adulthood: it is the exercise of choice and the acceptance of our responsibility for those choices.”

Myss moves on to a presentation of a new model of the human energy system based upon a synthesis of three spiritual traditions: the Hindu teachings regarding the charkas, the symbolic meaning of the seven Christian sacraments, and the mystical interpretation of the ten sefirot-or Tree of Life-presented in the Zohar, the major text of the Kabbalah, the mystical teachings of Judaism. These three spiritual traditions symbolize the seven levels of the human energy system, the seven stages of human development, and the seven essential lessons of the universal spiritual path, or the hero’s journey.

The Seven Sacred Truths which are covered in detail are:

• The First Chakra: Tribal Power

• The Second Chakra: The Power of Relationships

• The Third Chakra: Personal Power

• The Fourth Chakra: Emotional Power

• The Fifth Chakra: The Power of Will

• The Sixth Chakra: The Power of the Mind

• The Seventh Chakra: Our Spiritual Connector

In these heady chapters, Myss covers many subjects including the energy consequences of belief patterns, the challenge of managing sexual energy, the four stages of personal power, loving oneself as the path to the Divine, between the head and the heart, consciousness and death, spiritual crisis and the need for devotion. Myss concludes with a chapter titled “A Guide for the Contemporary Mystic” in which she delivers the following seven sacred truths of the body and spirit:

• All Is One

• Honor One Another

• Honor Oneself

• Love Is the Divine Power

• Surrender Personal Will to Divine Will

• Seek Only Truth

• Live In the Present Moment

I really enjoyed her fresh and insightful blending of three major religious belief systems. She examines the symbolic meaning of each of the seven sets, and how they relate to our physical health. She also gives examples from her practice of people who came to her with a challenge in their lives, and how the symbolic meanings of each center of power led that person to growth and change. She also gives some examples of how refusing to change and raise awareness led that person to continue with their illness.

At the end of the book, she provides practical steps that anyone can take to increase their own awareness of their energy flow, and leaks. Examine each power centre in relation to the symbolic meanings that she has provided in the rest of the book, and ask powerful questions to shed light on the areas we may not want to be aware of.

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