It is somewhat difficult to determine what Caroline Myss is best known for, although the vast majority of her work has sprung from her talent as a medical intuitive, and her work with neurosurgeon Norm Shealy, the founding president of The American Holistic Medical Association.

Myss wrote three New York Times bestselling books: Anatomy of the Spirit (1998), Why People Don't Heal and How They Can (1998), and Sacred Contracts (2002). Her most recent book is Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and your Soul, about the path to becoming a modern mystic. Her work is so prolific, though, that much of it has never been produced in a regular book format, and has instead been released as audio books. Another interesting note is that even when she produces an audio book of the same title as her hard back and trade paper books, she often delivers slightly different information in the two formats--- probably because it is difficult to catch all of her frequent asides (side comments in spoken lectures) in writing.

Anatomy of the Spirit and Why People Don't Heal and How They Can both concern illness in relationship to the 'chakras', the seven centers of human energy. Sacred Contracts takes this concept further, coupling it with C.G. Jung's concept of 'archetypes'. In the system Myss developed, she believes that each of us entered the world at birth with 12 personal archetypes, or patterns, which tend to determine our behavior throughout life--- with or without our knowledge of them. However, if we investigate those patterns, we are able to break free from them to a certain extent, or at least understand when the pattern is operating, and choose to live via the 'light side' of the archetype, rather than 'the shadow'.

In her system, which tends, in my mind to differ somewhat from Jung's, the 'light side' would be any of those things we might do which are progressive, healing and positive, whereas the shadow side would concern things which tend to keep us in patterns and relationships which are detrimental and negative, both to our psyche and our health. She does acknowledge Jung's concept as well, though: that the 'Shadow' is really anything which we are not aware of about ourselves, and how we operate in the world. In Jung's context, even those things which are considered 'positive' can be part of our 'shadow'. He didn't consider the shadow 'dark', but rather patterns in our reactions which determine our behavior, and whether they were positive or negative makes little difference if we are not aware of them--- as we are often as unaware of our positive characteristics as we are of our negative ones. (In fact we may often be more aware of our negative traits, but have no idea how to negate the pattern.)

Sacred Contracts is a rather involved system, but it does help one discover those things which are an impediment to living our best life, and co-creating what we want in life. It is also an excellent system for getting to know yourself better.