Caroline Myss - Biography

Biography

Caroline Myss was born on December 2, 1952 in Chicago, and grew up with her parents, and two brothers, one elder and one younger, in the Melrose Park, Illinois neighbourhood near Chicago. Caroline was raised a Catholic, and attended the Mother Guerin High School, River Grove, Illinois, run by the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana in 1974, and started her career in journalism in Chicago.

Caroline Myss received her PhD from an unaccredited institution (Greenwich University)which was originally based in Australia. Many critics question the validity of her degree, saying that she created a department at a fake University to grant herself a degree and lend credibility to her writings.

During the course of her career, she interviewed Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., the author of the famous book, On Death and Dying, which inspired her to pursue a Master's degree in theology from Mundelein College, Chicago, which she completed in 1979.

She started giving medical intuitive readings in 1982 and co-founded a small New Age publishing company, Stillpoint Publishing in Walpole, New Hampshire, where she also worked as an editor in 1983. Next she began consulting with holistic doctors, which in 1984, led to her extensive collaboration with Dr. Norman Shealy, an M.D. schooled at Harvard, and the founder of the American Holistic Medical Association, with whom she later co-authored, "Aids: Passageway to Transformation," in 1987, followed by "The Creation of Health: The Emotional, Psychological, and Spiritual Responses that Promote Health and Healing," in 1988. Deriving from her practice as a medical intuitive, she started writing books, in the field of energy medicine, and healing, all of which became New York Times Best Sellers. Starting with Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing (1996), which overlapped seven Christian sacraments with seven Hindu chakras and the Kabbalah's Tree of Life to create a map of the human "energy anatomy"; this was followed by Why People Don't Heal and How They Can (1998), which explored the reasons people do not heal through her concept of "woundology." Her next book, Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential (2002) dealt with the issue of finding "Life Purpose," while describing Sacred Contracts as "a set of assignments that our soul had formed around before incarnation". She has since appeared on the The Oprah Winfrey Show numerous times.

By 2000, she discontinued doing private medical intuitive readings, and began teaching how to do them through her workshops, seminars, radio shows and guided tours. She tours internationally as a speaker on spirituality and mysticism, and lives in Oak Park, Illinois, near Chicago. In 2003, she started the Caroline Myss Educational Institute, with Wisdom University in San Francisco.

Her 2007 book, "Entering the Castle" draws upon the writings of Saint Teresa of Ávila, a 16th century Carmelite nun, who wrote her most important work, The Interior Castle (1577), towards the end of her life. Her next book, Defy Gravity, Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason (2009) took the ideas further with mystical laws, the seven shadows and also seven graces inherent in all of us.

In June 2012, Myss appeared on an Super Soul Sunday episode with Oprah Winfrey, on OWN Network.