Myss’ Choices That Change Your Life

January 07, 2020

Why do we become ill? Why do we break down? What helps us to become better?

After 30 years, the great healer and author Caroline Myss distills the 5 choices that she recognizes as the most important ones for overall well being. And the choices aren’t the usual ones, like who we marry, or what career we choose or where we live. In fact, those are, comparatively, your small choices.

The choices that actually matter when it comes to your health and healing are the ones that you make in the privacy of your own company. These have the most powerful impact on your biology, on your soul, on your sense of who you are, on your well-being, on your whole life map.

Myss' 5 choices:

I choose to live with integrity. I walk my talk. I tell the truth. I don’t myself, nor do I ask others, to compromise their values to keep the peace or to get love. Myss speaks directly to what the body knows. “Now let me tell you something. Liars don’t heal. Liars don’t heal, so you can eat all the wheatgrass you want and you could do all this stuff with seeds and vegetables. But an honest person who eats cat food will go further than you. Dishonest people, people who lie, people who have moral crises and do not get it, people who blame others for things that they do and they know it. People who make choices and they know another person is going to pay for the consequence of their choice and they are conscious of it. They know for a fact that they are saying something that is not true and they know another person is going to be hurt by that. People who deliberately say things to hurt somebody. Believe you me, your body knows you did that. Your mind knows you did that; your heart and soul knows you did that. So you know you did that. So don’t tell yourself under any circumstances that the problem with your depression comes from your childhood. Don’t go there, knock it off, and make the decision to live an Integris life.

I choose to pass on my wisdom not my pain. I take it on myself to do my healing work, to learn to love and communicate well. We all have pain and grief, but we don’t pass that on to our children or let it out on the milkman. Life isn’t fair, you don’t need to know why, the pain might not go away. It’s not about denying the tragedies, but learning from them and choosing “it ends with me.”

I choose to take risks. Myss says, “Never look backward for guidance.” But especially, when you don’t know what to do next, do not go to what you once were or what used to exist. We weaken ourselves by looking backward. Instead, exist in the “newness” of possibility. Don’t ask for everything to be clear or easy. Take risks. Refuse to slide into regretful living. Most of the time we hold back on decisions that seem risky because we fear being humiliated by failure or by what others think.

I choose new words. Myss told a woman who came to her searching for answers to why healing eluded her, “Your vocabulary is so toxic that the vibration of your neurology includes thoughts, includes frequencies, that are so toxic that even if you do visualization, it is off-step by a vocabulary that is organically so negative…I don’t care what your visualization is…If I had to rate your vocabulary it is fundamentally hostile toward everything you see, toward everyone, and toward to yourself. You get up in the morning and you are hostile, your first thoughts are angry, you see your life as not enough, you see others as not enough. Your first reaction to everything is critical.” Clearly, any of us would do well to avoid words that promote those thoughts or reactions. Of particular note, Myss strongly suggests we avoid three powerful words: 1) blame, 2) deserve, 3) entitled. She says “If you could extricate those three words from your head, you have no idea how much better you would feel.”

I choose to get up and bless my day. To quote Myss, “You say... I have no idea what’s going to be in my day but it is blessed, why? Because I am alive. And don’t base your gratitude for your life on what you have or how you feel. But just because you are. Just because you are. Just because you are. And then hold in your heart this prayer. This day of my life will never come again. I will never see the people I am looking at again. I will never see this sunrise again and I will never see that sunset. I will never see the person having breakfast with me again. Just this way. You know, nothing in my life like this will ever come again. That alone, that choice alone should take out of your heart every bitter taste there is. That it should shape the life around you with such grace and such beauty. That will make you only want to see the present with great gratitude.

See her TedxFindhorn talk here.