Caroline Myss – Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul – Part 1
Living Dialogues
Duncan Campbell
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Episode 17 - Caroline Myss – Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul – Part 1

In Part 1 of this amazing dialogue, Caroline describes in detail the miraculous revelation she received in her connection with Teresa of Avila, the beloved 16th century mystic and author of the revered spiritual text, The Interior Castle (as newly translated for our time by Mirabai Starr). These revelations became the source of her insights in this new book into the contemporary "mystical renaissance" that is going beyond the "New Age" and responding to the pull of evolution itself. More details on this episode go to http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/living-dialogues/episode017-caroline-myss-entering-the-castle.html

Transcript

Transcript

Caroline Myss – Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul – Part 1

Announcer:  This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com.

[Music]

This is Caroline Myss with Duncan Campbell on Living Dialogues, one of the best programs you will ever listen to.

Caroline Myss: I have to say you are one of the best interviewers I have ever been with and I want to thank for you for the great respect you have for the subject of your interviewees. That is a rare, rare, rare gift.

Caroline Myss: You are a great interviewer.

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous counsels and ancient wisdom traditions through the work of western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bohm, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning, a die or flow of logos meaning beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you, the active, deep listener we evoke and engage in Living Dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome to Living Dialogues. I am your host, Duncan Campbell and with me for this particular dialogue I am truly delighted to have once again my friend Caroline Myss as my guest. Caroline and I have done Dialogues before about her prior books, “Sacred Contracts”, “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can”, and “Anatomy of the Spirit” all of them New York Times Bestsellers.

Today we are going to be talking about her new book, “Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God in Your Soul” which has immediately gone to the New York Times Bestseller List as well. She is a pioneer in international lecture in the fields of energy medicine and human consciousness. For twenty years she worked as a medical intuitive – one who sees illness in a patient’s body by intuitive means and specialized in helping people understand the emotional, psychological, and physical reasons why their bodies develop illness.

In 2003, she founded the CMED Institute, an educational program that specializes in intensive classes on archetypes, personal power, mysticism, and sacred contracts. She appeared in two highly successful public television programs- “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can” and “Three Levels of Power and How to Use Them.” Caroline has also appeared several times on Oprah and on other major national media programs. Raised a Catholic, Caroline attended Mother Guerin High School, graduated from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana, and received a Masters Degree in Theology from Mundelein College. She lives in Chicago, Illinois. And for more information, you can visit her at www.myss.com.

So Caroline what a delight to have you back in the studios here.

Caroline Myss: Well thank you, thank you Duncan. It’s good to be with you. I can’t believe they have my high school in there. Actually, actually in keeping with what we are going to talk about in terms of “Entering the Castle” and St. Teresa of Avila.

Duncan Campbell: The great 16th century mystic from Spain…

Caroline Myss: The great 16th. century mystic…Mother Guerin  as in Mother Guerin High School, was the founderess of my college, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College and she is now the fifth American saint and her Feast Day is the same as Saint Teresa. She was just canonized this past October 15th. So now both of these nuns, these great nuns have the same Feast Day but I will also share with you something that is quite remarkable and now properly called Saint Mother Guerin. Two-and-a-half weeks ago on my book tour, I was in Boston and it was a weekend and CNN ran a loose segment about a man who was going blind and his retina and I forget but I think it was his left eye, was completely deteriorated and he was facing the possibility of a very rigorous and highly risky surgery and he heard church bells ringing and so he went into this church and he prayed in front of the portrait of this nun and this took place about a year-and-half ago and he was recalling the story actually.

He said to this nun who at the time was at her state of Beatification which means that one healing had been credited to her, one more and she would qualify for sainthood by the Catholic tradition. He said to her, “If you have any influence at all, I would appreciate it if you used it on my behalf. I just would prefer not to go through this and I would appreciate if my sight could be returned to me.” And he woke up the next morning and his sight was fully restored.

His physician declared that this couldn’t happen of course and shortly thereafter both of them went to Rome and were investigated by the Committee on Miracles which of course the Vatican has and it was declared an official miracle and that was Mother Guerin and that is the college I went to and the miracle occurred on the grounds of the college.

Duncan Campbell: Amazing.

Caroline Myss: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: Totally amazing.

Caroline Myss: So that is the college I went to. These are the nuns who educated me and now of course there are pilgrimages that are being done.

Duncan Campbell: To the college?

Caroline Myss: Well, yeah the Church.

Duncan Campbell: In the college, yeah.

Caroline Myss: which is where Mother Guerin is Saint Mother Guerin now.

Duncan Campbell: Is that where she stayed?

Caroline Myss: Yeah. And I consider that extraordinary. These are the girls who educated me. And within that context where I was so absolutely out of my body with delight when she was canonized on the same Feast Day as Saint Teresa of Avila. You know there are many Saint Teresas, you have Saint Teresa of the Roses, [indecipherable] etc.    

Duncan Campbell: Little, little flower Saint Teresas.
Caroline Myss: Little flowers, of course. And this Avila the Great Mystic, the one that Bernini represented in his famous, famous statue, “The Ecstasy of Teresa.”

Duncan Campbell: And also the great friend and companion of Saint John of the Cross.

Caroline Myss: That’s correct.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly.

Caroline Myss: So for me it means nothing to anyone else but me but I was absolutely in ecstasy when I found out that Mother Guerin was in fact canonized on that same day.

I just had to share that story because she is now the fifth American saint and the miracle occurred on the campus of my college which is also a convent. I just think that for me, for me personally it is a big deal.

Duncan Campbell: It absolutely is a big deal and there is one other person in the world at least that is very interested in that and that is myself.

[Laughter]

Duncan Campbell: I have to say before you even arrived here today Caroline, just having seen your new book “Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul” I have been talking with our mutual friend Mirabai Starr who is the great translator of our times.

Caroline Myss: Yes, absolutely.

Duncan Campbell: of the Interior Castle

Caroline Myss: And John of the Cross

Duncan Campbell: bringing it to life and John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul bringing these two mystical texts to life in the modern idiom and in their deep poetry. I didn’t find out until I talked with Mirabai that Saint John of the Cross is the most popular poet in Spain. He is perceived as a poet saint, a mystical saint in the tradition of Rumi, the Persian poet Saint and in fact she said to me when she was here we were doing our Dialogues that she thinks of Saint John of the Cross as the Rumi of Spain. And I said, “Well Mirabai, that’s very interesting because I think of Teresa of Avila as the Mirabai of Spain” after the great Poet Saint of India, Mirabai whose…

Caroline Myss: Oh I see. Right.

Duncan Campbell: whose dedication to Krishna was so overpowering and who had rapturous moments with Krishna and who violated social conventions but came from a good family, all of the same things that

Caroline Myss: They were orgasmic mystics.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly and they broke the conventions.

Caroline Myss: Mystical orgasms.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly and the final thing I want to say is that your personal work is so powerful that it was my feeling before you even came in and told me the story that you are in some kind of direct karmic channel with that energy that you are bringing it through in a very powerful, illumined way and to find out that you went to high school [laughs] with Mother Guerin as nuns and then where actually going to chapel for Guerin college at the very place where this miracle took place and then there is this connection of the same Feast Day. To me it makes perfect sense and I am delighted to be a co-celebrant here.

Caroline Myss: It brings me a full circle. It makes me feel like [indecipherable].  Annabelle I just could never get away from the girls but I am not scarf catholic. I am not a Vatican-worshipping Catholic but I have always adored the mysticism.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly and in that sense you are so like Teresa because Teresa like you was very spunky and outspoken and had a sort of natural vivacity to her despite the fact that she was a nun just like yourself and she also went out into the world. She was forced to go out into the world in a way the inquisition came to her and said we are very suspicious of these rapturous experiences. We think they may be coming from the devil where requiring you to make journal of all these which eventually became La Vida or the Book of My Life which is just out in a new, wonderful, translation by Mirabai Starr and the remarkable thing about it is that instead of caving in to this institutional pressure, she said to them, you know I have been investigating my own rapturous experience because I have got a lot at stake here – even more than you do because I do not want to be inhabited by the devil and I have come up with my own test and my own test is this: If I come away from one of these undimmed rapturous séances and I find that my heart is open with greater compassion to all of the world and love and everyone in it then I know that this is really a connection with God, with the Beloved and I use that myself and as she began to just pour heart out literally and describe in intimate detail how she was relating to her experiences, gradually these scholarly, dogmatic inquisitors came over to her side and became her students. What a wonderful story!

Caroline Myss: I did not myself know much about Teresa other than the basic as a student of mysticism in the way one studies many mystics before you choose your specialty.

Duncan Campbell: Or get chosen as the case may be.

Caroline Myss: Or get chosen as the case may be.

Duncan Campbell: You can feel the energy, yeah.

Caroline Myss: And as you know that I was not going to tell the story at all of how my work with Teresa began, I was simply going to write the “Entering the Castle.” I was never going to reveal how I began my work with Teresa or Teresa with me because I am really quite close to her about my personal life. It was my editor that pushed me to that, not me and my introduction originally in the book was about why I find and think her work today is so valuable to the contemporary mystic out of a monastery, why I see a mystical renaissance happening, which is why there are two introductions. And I deeply believe that there is a mystical renaissance – my dear friend Mirabai is very much a part of it.

Duncan Campbell: Mirabai Starr.

Caroline Myss: Right.

Duncan Campbell: Yes.

Caroline Myss: And the passionate love- I have listened to people use the phrase- “I am in the dark night.” The language of the great John of the Cross has filtered into the common market as if it was a phrase that was always there and if you said to someone who coined that. Many have no idea it was the great Saint John of the Cross who wrote it from underneath a staircase locked in a latrine by Dominicans in the 1600’s who hold him out to be tortured in front of them while they eat a meal.

This little, petty 5 foot Carmelite who said in a prayer, “God help me to survive this not by escaping, but by finding a way to love greater than my fear and my resentment of these human beings.” And that’s how he discovered the “Dark Night of the Soul.” A poem is celebration of God in which he recognizes the stripping away of the senses so that an unreasonable experience can make you cosmically abundant with love. Now I realize that we are in a mystical renaissance.

Duncan Campbell: We are.

Caroline Myss: And I wanted to start my book with that, that people are being called into mysticism as a layman’s path, Duncan.

Duncan Campbell: Yes, absolutely.

Caroline Myss: and I know that and that the indicators of what drew the mystics way back when are bubbling in people that they oftentimes treat that as a psychological crisis or as an emotional crisis and they drug themselves, they go to therapy because people treat pain as an indicator that something is wrong instead of pain as something right. They have no idea that in some cases when a certain type of pain arrives they should say, “Thank God! I have been waiting for this” and walk toward it and walk in it and say, “This is my release from a life of illusion and I am going to get back to work.” The seed that was planted in this new age which is now quite middle-aged and rather flabby, am I right?

Duncan Campbell: and wilted

Caroline Myss: And wilted that has contaminated people to believing that they are all born for something great, but I will get to it as soon as I find it.

Duncan Campbell: After I work on myself

Caroline Myss: after I work on myself and heal everything and get even with everybody who ever hurt me, but what they really mean is, “I will wait till it is given to me, I will wait till it comes to me”

Duncan Campbell: Painlessly.

Caroline Myss: Painlessly and with a pension plan. Otherwise I am not getting off my dough and I will not take any risks…

Duncan Campbell: and I won’t get on my knees…

Caroline Myss: prayers are never brought into it. We won’t even go there, yet. Actually that is how I was going to start my book because it is about everybody else, because it is about drawing people into the mystical path and my editor said, “And you?”

Duncan Campbell: [Laughter] Madam?

Caroline Myss: “And what drew you into this mystical path?” because I was writing another book. I was completely writing another book. I was totally on a different direction and what motivated me was really my previous book.

Duncan Campbell: Including “The Visible Acts of Power” where…

Caroline Myss: “The Visible Acts of Power”

Duncan Campbell: where you remember when we did our Dialogues on that actually you were very emotionally moved as you recalled right in the midst of our Dialogue those many thousands or hundreds and thousands of emails you received you said, “Duncan you can’t imagine what it’s like to be sitting there in my office and reading these heartfelt emails about what has happened to people and how they have felt these “invisible acts of power.”

Caroline Myss: Thank you, even your recall is mind boggling, Duncan.

Duncan Campbell: Well, it made an impression on me even as we were speaking there was a moment of illumination for both of us.

Caroline Myss: But you know what my frustration was that I was never able to articulate what it was about invisible acts that shadowed me…

Duncan Campbell: Yes, I see.

Caroline Myss: Until I did “Entering the Castle” and what it was is that the tiniest act of service or compassion had the most compelling, life-transforming impact on a human being and in keeping with that what I found so awesome and by awe, it did fill me with awe, in many degrees of awe was that I realized and not intellectually, I realized it almost through my heart and in my core was that all my years of teaching sacred contracts, all my years of hearing people say to me, ask me what is my highest potential, what is my sacred contract- all my years of trying to explain to people that the contract was an essence, an interior document. I finally saw it myself. I finally got it and I could see that the highest potential of a human being was the capacity to channel grace to another human being, a grace of such high exquisite potential that the capacity to walk over to a homeless person as this homeless man said to me, “My greatest gift. The reason I am not homeless today is not the 10 dollars someone gave me which was my largest contribution, my largest gift but because someone was not afraid to touch me while I was in rags and that person said to me you will get out of this and I will pray for you.”

Now Duncan I will tell you for a fact that most people who are walking down the street, all fit, stretched in their outfits and even not fittest. If they heard the command, “Go touch my homeless child so I can heal them through you”, would not do it. They would not do it Duncan because they would respond by saying, “What if someone saw me do it?” “What if someone saw me touch this person, what would my friends say?” and you know why because we are possessed by the fear of being humiliated and we would not walk up to that person. We are afraid that a homeless person will reject us, much less someone less.

We are afraid to be seen mingling with someone like that and that is what I understood. I was honestly brought to my knees when I saw that. It was a world that dropped into me. It was a mystical renaissance that came into me. I was the one that awakened and when I saw that, when I saw that, I had a Grand mal seizure.

Duncan Campbell: Right on the street.

Caroline Myss: No. In my office.

Duncan Campbell: In your office.

Caroline Myss: Really I was saturated in scripture, I was saturated in sacred writings. I wanted to find the route to be able to show people that all of these beautiful, beautiful acts that people were doing were really channeling grace and that every single thing the great teachers, the great saints, Buddha, Jesus, the great texts, the Psalms everything, the Bhagvad Gita- every great teaching told us about a true act of grace – listening to God and acting upon that on this earth really did heal, really did resurrect a human being and that that took the greatest courage. When I really had my mystical awakening in that moment I was so filled with awe- something melted so deeply in me and in that instant.

I felt as if a light was coming into me and I knew, I absolutely knew, I had melted into God and it was a heat, it was a fire, and my body started to shake and I was out cold. When I came to, I knew that I had been rewired.

Duncan Campbell: I was going to say that very thing.

Caroline Myss: I knew it. I didn’t know why or whatever but it was about 4 or 5 months later that when I was teaching that I met Teresa, Saint Teresa while I was in front of my students and I was going to teach John of the Cross that day at my CMED Institute and I had grabbed her great classic work “Interior Castle” quite by accident and I thought what difference would it make to start with her and then I will go to John of the Cross and the Holy [indecipherable] whatever.

Duncan Campbell: And how did that come do you say, just by accident? Tell us the detail there- how the book came to you, the “Interior Castle.”

Caroline Myss: Well actually because that is her classic work. That is her great work on the treatise of her path of illumination to God told in prayer.

Duncan Campbell: The reason I ask this is that it seems to me that as you recount the beautiful story that you just said had happened to you, it could be archetypically a story that happened to Saint Teresa and so I thought you might have very similar - reminded me of her own experience and the kind of things that happened to her that may be you went to her as a fellow initiate let us say. But it sounds like she came to you in a way that the…

 Caroline Myss: I did not go to her as she was not in my horizon.

Duncan Campbell: That is what I mean. So I would like to know how the book appeared. It really sounds like it came to you.

Caroline Myss: Well what I wanted while I was introducing my students to the nature of the mystic, to the quality of their work, and to mystics that seemed to have returned to our mainstream which was in support of my thesis that we are in a mystical renaissance. People are drawn to the work of Teresa again of Avila, to the work of John of the Cross again, to the work of Ignatius Loyola, to the work of Rumi, to the work of Tagore, to the work of Thomas Martin. All of these great mystics are flooding our interior world again.

Duncan Campbell: and Saint Francis.

Caroline Myss: Saint Francis of Assisi, all other great mystics.

Duncan Campbell: It is their time, it is our time.

Caroline Myss: It is their time. You know mysticism is to interior chaos what fundamentalism is to exterior chaos. I would tell you that right now. And those are the two polarities. So as the interior, as peoples’ interior goes more and more into chaos, they seek a deeper level of truth that is beyond trying to straighten out their emotions. They need to go to a constant and that constant is God. And, at a deeper level, they are using God as a protectorate, “Please watch my house.” They need to have a vision of what is going on in the world around them that is rooted in truth and not in fear and that is mysticism. When you start to seek a greater transcendent truth as a ray of understanding what is happening around you - you are now beginning to seek a mystical path and not a social one, not a cultural one, not a political one, but a mystical one.

Duncan Campbell: and not even we might say a religious one.

Caroline Myss: and not a religious one. Religion, let us face it, all religions are the politics of God, God made political. I mean fundamentalism is the response of earthly chaos. So these two polarities are now the two rubber bands: they are the points, they are the end points of the rubber band. In the middle is the earth, spinning, spinning, spinning…

So what happened was I was going to introduce in mysticism, my mysticism segment of the CMED class – the first day was going to be about the Christian mystics, the next day the Eastern mystics, and then the third day how they are being absorbed into us today and why their work is so relevant to our contemporary crisis and what is emerging in us. So I thought I would just start with John of the Cross just because people are so familiar with the phrase “dark night of the soul” just to show that the relevance is even archetypal in the phrase that we are applying it to bad days in earth school.

Duncan Campbell: It is really very interesting. There is one thing that I am really struck with by the poem, “The Dark Night of Soul” which he wrote and then his fellow monks said please give us a commentary on this and then he wrote a commentary and he stopped a certain point and that’s what Saint John’s Dark Night of the Soul is. There is a short poem with long commentary which stops at some point abruptly, but one of the images in the poem that really my heart and imagination was when he talked about being in the garden in the dark with the Beloved and my path lit only by the fire within my heart. And so these are our times.

We are in times of darkness where we have to find that fire within and then know that that lamp has been lit by something larger than ourselves and to have the faith to go forward in the darkness with the answer he was such a perfect choice for your thesis.

Caroline Myss: Yes, yes totally. But I grabbed “Interior Castle” by Teresa instead and I thought well it really doesn’t matter whether I started with John or Teresa. And then as I sat on my chair in class, I was holding Interior Castle. I introduced her to the students and I said, “This is Teresa of Avila. She was a sixteenth century, the greatest saint, the Patroness of Spain, the Great Mystic.

I suddenly found that my senses were going numb and I couldn’t hear a thing in the class room. I couldn’t hear a thing and I actually thought I was going to have another seizure because I hadn’t had other seizures you see. And I became very frightened and I found that I had entered into sort of a chamber of silence and then I heard, “Follow me daughter” and I knew I was with Teresa of Avila. And you know, I was in front of all my students mind you and Duncan I am really a devoted teacher and I am a very good teacher and I thought well I sure hope nobody saw this and they all did. They all did. They didn’t see an apparition of Teresa mind you. She is not quite yet [indecipherable].

Duncan Campbell: Right, real elegant.

Caroline Myss: Yes. But they saw something. They knew something had happened and I just gripped her book and somehow they knew something was happening to me. And then all for the rest of the weekend I taught Teresa and the Castle as if I couldn’t let her go Duncan. What happened was God flooded me with a passion and I could only follow it. I was so afraid I would lose my connection to her that I didn’t want to get off that chair and I wouldn’t let go of the book. I thought, “Oh, no, no. Don’t let go of me. I can’t let go of you.” I wouldn’t let anyone know that this is what was going on, but everyone saw something was going on. I went to one of my friends there who was a judge who got educated. Now this sounds like I favor Catholics and I want to take it on as an aside and say that one seeks a comfort zone where the familiarity with saints, with mystical events, with mystical contact is a given and this I knew to be the case with my friend Jim Curtin and I went to him and I said, “I have been contacted.” And he said, “I saw.” I said, “It’s Saint Teresa.” And he said, “I suspected.” And I said, “I..I…” And he said, “Go!, go!!”

Duncan Campbell: Follow that voice, follow that soul-call.

Caroline Myss: Well when I went home that Sunday I deleted my whole book that I had been working on.

Duncan Campbell: The other book, yeah.

Caroline Myss: I had eight-months of worth of work and I had deadline in five months. And you know [illegible].

Duncan Campbell: Well they are in the external castle.

Caroline Myss: I went up to my office I deleted everything I had, 211 pages.

Duncan Campbell: And you deleted it.

Caroline Myss: I deleted it, back up and all.

Duncan Campbell: It is an act of great courage.

Caroline Myss: I sat down and deleted. I threw out the notes. Deleted the…

Duncan Campbell: Threw away your safety-net.

Caroline Myss: Deleted everything, deleted everything, absolutely everything and I phoned my editor the next day and I said, “Leslie,” – who I had been with 12 years and through several books as you know and you get very close to your editor you become mind-mates, you become soul mates of a different sort and I said, “The book I was writing is gone. I am now writing ‘Entering the Castle’ with Teresa of Avila.”  I said with her, not about her, I said with her.

My editor doesn’t miss a trick. She heard ‘with’ and not ‘about’. And I told her what happened. I said, “Teresa came to me in the class room” and my editor knows me to be an extremely grounded person, a very well-educated person who doesn’t seduce easily, who isn’t seeking that kind of thing.

Duncan Campbell: Very practical person.

Caroline Myss: Very spiritually practical person and she paused for a moment. She said, “I have not felt you in this space since you wrote “Anatomy of the Spirit.” And she said, “Tell Teresa you have got five months.” [Laughter]

Duncan Campbell: This is so great. What I am hearing in this story is that your students were meant to see this and your friend John was to meant see it whereas Teresa was manifesting in a way that was pulling you out into the world and so your instinct as was her instinct to remain cloistered was not going to be allowed by this greater power, this greater energy, and in the voice of your friend, Leslie from the exterior castle saying, “Tell her she has got five months” and pulling out and giving you the deadline, beautiful.

Caroline Myss: Well, I will tell you what happened that same day since we are here together. That very same day, as I sat down at my kitchen table and you sort of spiritually sober-up, you know what I am saying.

Duncan Campbell: After one of these rapturous experiences.

Caroline Myss: Yeah. But the whole thing was rapturous and Teresa I would say in her Sixth Mansion she talks about the various types of mystical experiences one of which is intellectual revelation and that is how we engaged. There were no visions, no grabbing of right hand and writing wildly. It was very rigorous, okay? But that Monday, after I had of course wiped down my book, and then told my editor I was now writing a mystical text.

Duncan Campbell: What was the other book going to be about?

Caroline Myss: The other one was very much a reflection of what I have typically written which is much more an intellectual text in which my thesis was that we are born natural intuitives and that God is its Organic Divinity. We are born instinctual and from instinct develops a next level of intuition just out of our own curiosity and that is Organic Divinity. God on our bones.

Duncan Campbell: which merit some of your childhood experiences that you have spoken about  on prior Living Dialogues.

Caroline Myss: Yeah.

Duncan Campbell: Yes, exactly. But now you have had another huge revelation beyond even that.

Caroline Myss: Yeah and then eventually we simply will emerge to the desire for a sacred – a contact with the sacred and this was the flow of this book, okay. It had a much more intellectual theme – this is the Soul.

Duncan Campbell: But the sacred contact erupted, right in the middle of your project.

Caroline Myss: It erupted. Finally the sacred came to the contract shall we say? [Laughter]

Duncan Campbell: Yeah, right.

Caroline Myss: So that Monday as I sat there and I thought about everything that had taken place in my life in the last three days. I had literally wiped out – I had encountered a Saint or more to the point she encountered me. I had thrown out eight months’ of work. I had agreed to write something. I had committed myself, I should say, to writing something I knew nothing about. Do you understand I knew nothing about…?

Duncan Campbell: Absolutely.

Caroline Myss: I had no idea where I was going with this book. I had no idea what the content would be. I was not familiar with this. I didn’t know what I was doing and yet I had a vision of it so deep already inside of me that had simply burst into me. Burst like a fire. I knew fully I was reliant upon a Saint, the mail came.

Duncan Campbell: This is on the third day.

Caroline Myss: The third day, the fourth. It’s the fourth. The mail came. In the mail is a letter from England. It’s an envelope from England and this is the only thing in the envelope, Duncan. This is it. This is the only thing in the envelope. I pull this out. I don’t recognize this handwriting and as you can see the first word is hardly legible, agreed?

Duncan Campbell: Yes. It’s very – almost illegible.

Caroline Myss: Okay. But the handwriting is done in a fountain pen and it is quite distinctive, agreed?

Duncan Campbell: Yes it is.

Caroline Myss: Okay.

Duncan Campbell: It is actually, quite almost like calligraphy.

Caroline Myss: It is like calligraphy and it reads, “Caroline, what I now know this to be is I am” although at that time I cannot in the world figure that out. And it says, “Praying for your health and protection each day. May God guide you with every step. With love and prayers.” I cannot make out that name. I don’t know if it is “Colette”, “Lorette”  I cannot make out that name.

Duncan Campbell: I would say it is “Colette”. And it looks like “Lorette.” It could be either one.

Caroline Myss: Don’t know. Finish reading it.

Duncan Campbell: “Thank you so much for lighting our way.”

Caroline Myss: But here is the significance. What does it say at the bottom?

Duncan Campbell: Contemplation Series 41, Carmelite Monastery,

Caroline Myss: Carmelite Monastery! Right?

Duncan Campbell: Quidenham, Norfolk, England.

Caroline Myss: She is from England this person is. But she is from Carmelite Monastery.

Duncan Campbell: Exactly, Carmelite Monastery.

Caroline Myss: And I was ecstatic. Now turn around and read that.

Duncan Campbell: And here we have a beautiful pond, a lily pond and it says, “Let Nothing Disturb You! God Alone Suffices! Saint Teresa of Avila.” What this reminds me of is what happened to you earlier. One time you had told me in a prior Dialogue that you had gone to see a great Indian, the Sai Baba and that at one point you had gone sick and you were thinking about the fact that you needed to I think to make one of your publishing dates or a speaking date or something and in the mail arrived that day when you were sick the “Vibhuti” which had been sent may be 13 days earlier from India. The same kind of thing, although, this is so much more intimate in a way this receiving this card from a woman. Have you ever been able to track her down?

Caroline Myss: Well, okay.

Duncan Campbell: Call left or got letter.

Caroline Myss: Here’s the rest of the story. So when I started writing that book and I keep that card which is the size of a bookmarker right on my desk at all my times. That December a card arrives from the same woman and it says, “I have lit a candle for you in this one Carmelite chapel and a Carmelite monastery. They oftentimes have a public chapel though, you know, the nuns don’t go, but it’s for the outsiders and I still don’t know who she is and I still can’t make out that signature. Now the end of the book which is a year ago this month, the draft, the first draft had to go in. I can’t believe it’s a year. How time goes, Duncan!

Duncan Campbell: Really.

Caroline Myss: How time goes! So it was a year ago, this month that the draft was done and I had to send it in because I had to go to Findhorn, my wonderful place up in Scotland that I go to all the time and I quickly finished it, sent it, emailed the last part of it to my editor. I hop on the plane, I go to Findhorn which is my very favorite place on earth. I have to give a workshop on “Entering the Castle.” I get into their universal hall and there is a podium. I put my notes on the podium and there is the identical bookmark and I look at it and I flip it over, the identical handwriting.

Duncan Campbell: The identical quotation from Saint Teresa…

Caroline Myss: It’s the identical, the identical.

Duncan Campbell: the pond…

Caroline Myss: And now I know this person is in my audience…

Duncan Campbell: In Findhorn?

Caroline Myss: Right. So I stop and say to audience and I said, “I will not begin my workshop…”

Duncan Campbell: “Until…”

Caroline Myss: “unless this person comes up here. I will not, I will not, I will not…” and I was like shaking with – so up walks this Irish woman, beautiful Irish woman in her late 40s, early 50s and I said, “Who are you?” And she said, “My name is Collette.” And I said, “What, what, what??? What do you…?” And she said, “Well I was told to pray for you.” And I said, “By who?” “Saint Teresa. And I didn’t like you so much why I don’t know. Is it done?” I said, “What?” She said, “What you were doing, it is done?” And I said, “Yeah it is done.” “So I can stop praying for you now?” [Laughter] and I said, “Yeah.”

Duncan Campbell: Wonderful, Irish!

Caroline Myss: And she said, “I thought I would come to see you. You are not so bad you know. I have been looking at you, but okay then just may be I will keep you in the prayers.” I am still in touch with her. As a matter of fact, I am taking a group of students with me for the first time to Avila to do a workshop in Avila, Spain at Saint Teresa’s.

Duncan Campbell: Wonderful, and will she come with you?

Caroline Myss: Well the weekend before I am doing one in the Castle.

Duncan Campbell: I see. In Ireland?

Caroline Myss: In Scotland. I did Ireland already and I wanted to do a workshop in Castles to…

Duncan Campbell: Which one will it be?

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell