Product Description

Caroline Myss, author of the New York Times bestsellers Anatomy of the Spirit and Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, presents an exciting, highly original program in this long-awaited book. Based on her internationally popular workshop of the same name, Sacred Contracts is a brilliant synthesis of psychology, healing guidance, and spiritual insight.

As a medical intuitive, Myss has found that people often don’t understand their purpose in life, which has led to a spiritual malaise of epidemic proportions. This metaphysical disease in turn leads to depression, anxiety, fatigue, and eventually physical illness.

But our purpose—our individual Sacred Contract—is often difficult to apprehend. For this reason, Myss developed an enjoyable and ingenious process for deciphering your own Contract using a new theory of archetypes that builds on the works of Jung, Plato, and contemporary thinkers. She first recounts how the concept of Sacred Contracts took form in myths and other cultural traditions through the ages. She then examines the lives of the spiritual masters and prophets—Abraham, Jesus, the Buddha, and Muhammad—whose archetypal journeys illustrate the four stages of a Sacred Contract and provide clues for discovering your own.

With her signature motivational style and stories, Myss explains how you can identify your particular spiritual energies, or archetypes—the gatekeepers of your higher purpose—and use them to help you find out what you are here on earth to learn and whom you are meant to meet. In coming to know your archetypal companions, you also begin to see how to live your life in ways that make the best use of your personal power and lead you to fulfill your greatest—in fact, your divine—potential.

In this process, you learn how to see your life—and the lives of others—symbolically, allowing you to manage your personal power without getting caught up in emotional drama. You will also learn how to fulfill your Sacred Contract: what you and only you are here on earth to do. Finally, Myss offers specific guidance for locating your physical and emotional vulnerabilities and healing any susceptible areas.

Both visionary and practical, Sacred Contracts is a completely unique process of self-discovery and spiritual archaeology and a bold, powerful work of spiritual wisdom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141563 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-02
• Released on: 2002-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
We all come into this world with Sacred Contracts according to bestselling author Caroline Myss. Some know it as a calling. Some see it as a life mission. "In short, a Sacred Contract is an agreement your soul makes before you are born", Myss explains. "You promise to do certain things for yourself, for others, and for divine purposes. Part of the Contract requires that you discover what you are meant to do". Herein lies the rub. Decoding our Sacred Contract requires us to become fluent in the language of symbols and archetypes so that we can interpret dreams, understand the meaning behind "coincidences", and learn to follow our intuition. This is why Myss offers an extensive lesson on helping readers recognise their personal archetypes (we have about 12 of them), such as the Avenger (righteous activists), Networker (journalists, messengers), or Prostitute (someone who "sells out" easily). Myss then goes on to help readers create their own "Chart of Origin" (which profiles your "spiritual DNA"), using the teachings of the chakras and astrology. Part science, part ancient tradition, part magic, this book will gratify readers who are prepared to study the fine print of their Sacred Contracts. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly
As incongruous as it may seem at first glance to her legions of fans, Myss, a popular intuitive healer and teacher, and the bestselling author of Anatomy of the Spirit, thinks it makes perfect sense to describe her approach to spirituality as that of an archetypal "Saboteur." After all, it takes a thief to catch a thief, she explains in her latest work. In her workshops and readings, she goes "on a search and destroy mission to find my students' spiritual panic.... Deep in the unconscious, our spiritual potential lies in wait for us to release it. Sometimes you will have to blow things out of your own way to get to it." Here, Myss offers her readers a new system for blowing away pedestrian notions of their purpose on the planet. She espouses the ancient notion that our souls enter into a kind of contract before birth that we agree to have various human experiences and even (in Myss's version) to encounter certain people in order to learn lessons. The author includes a technique for arriving at 12 archetypes that rule different areas of our life from career to sex to our highest aspirations. While each of us is controlled in different ways by four "survival" archetypes Child, Victim, Prostitute, Saboteur the other archetypes that flavor our relations to the world are up to us and as richly different as Vampire and Messiah. One value of Myss's ingenious system is that, like the I Ching, it teaches readers to use symbols not as one-dimensional descriptions but as a call to reflection and imagination and a means to see ourselves in a greater light. 18-city author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
A longtime leading voice in the field of energy medicine and human consciousness, Myss turns her attention to explaining how a sacred contract can serve as a compass to help us find our purpose in life. This program, an audio workshop meant to enhance her book of the same name, explains how we can contract with heavenly guides and how we can discover our life purpose using 12 archetypes and a symbolic wheel of life. Myss is at her best in live programs, and this one is no exception. She is at ease with an audience, frequently including personal anecdotes to illustrate her message. Her voice conveys passion for her subject, as well as awe at the mystery she sees as a part of a full life. P.B.J. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Useful to a degree
The premise of this book is to better understand who you are by using archetypes and then deriving what your 'sacred contrats' are based on these archetypes. The first half of the book is very useful as the reader learns about the four primary archetypes that we all have as well as how they influence our actions or reactions in various situations. The reader then selects 8 other archetypes that fit them based on information provided in the back of the text on various archetypes. Three serious downfalls of this book are:

1. limited information about each archetype's strengths/weaknesses; responses/actions; acended;descended attitudes - The readers are left to intuit much of this information about themselves with limited information to help guide them along the path. (I don't count examples of movies or myths to be useful as you would have to see the movie or know the myth to understand how it applies and most readers will not do that.) Surely the author could have spent a little more time elaborating on the archetypes that her readers will be assessing themselves to have.

2. What I believe to be a serious error is the author's assessment that we have the same 12 archetypes with us all our lives. I can attest to the fact that a certain points in my life I was guided by specific archetypes which are no longer part of my 'family.' As we develop and change (yes, we do change if we are aiming to grow spiritually) what was true of us at age 15 might no longer be true of us at age 40. If we are stagnant then it is likely we will remain the same 12 archetypes, but many of us will move on to others as we develop. (BTW the number 12 is chosen so we can do a zodiac wheel using archetypes and otherwise has no real logic behind it.) Honestly, I think I have about 14 archetypes and I have friends who have 8. Hmmm? Do we then just choose them because we have to?

3. My final concern is use of a zodiac wheel to give more specific meaning to each of the 12 archetypes we chose. My greatest issue here is that there is no rhyme or reason to selection of what archetype goes where. You just cut up papers with the names of the archetypes and numbers on them then pick from the piles and match them up on the wheel. (I kid you not!) A serious concern here is that if a reader has a Hedonist archetype and ends up with that in her Marriage & Relationship house, she could continually view herself from that perspective if she is deeply in need of 'sacred contracts' to make more sense of her life. Thus, even though she may have the Mother as one of her archetypes which may suit her far better in this house, she might judge herself over cautiously in her marriage and as a mother and thus be harder on herself and not find pleasures or draw out the pleasure of being a mother/wife because she thinks of herself as a hedonist in those roles.

Am I over dramatizing this scenario? Possibly. But the reader should take the zodiac wheel (which the author changes slightly to better 'fit' the archetype context - another cause for concern) part of this book with a grain of salt.

Barring these pitfalls, the use of archetypes to help one discover and rise to meet their spiritual contracts as well as better understand themselves is insightful as is much of this book.

I believe that all readers can benefit from this book if they remember to take what they find to be true for them and leave the rest. If only 9 archetypes really fit you then allow that and don't feel like you HAVE to find 3 more. If 15 fit you, then be okay with that, too. Finally, forget about the zodiac wheel because it will give you a very limited perspective of yourself and is more likely detrimental to how you grow spiritually than anything else. And for all the work you will put into trying to understand how each archetype affects each house, you would be better off assessing where each archetype appears in your life and what you can learn from it's appearance, whether it is in it's shadow or not.

Reader From Reading, PA
I read alot of spiritual books but this one I could not get into. I don't feel it had anything inspiring or worthwhile to say about sacred contracts, I was just bored and got nothing out of it, I was kinda dissapointed I thought it sounded like a great book to read.

A Confusing Mish-Mosh of a System. . . .
Not a poorly written book by any means, this book's "system" for self-discovery is a complicated mish-mosh of Chakra, Astrology, and Jung, with a few groovy wheels and charts thrown in to assist in analysis.

There are certainly simpler ways to discover one's "calling" than to put oneself through the rigors of the steps outlined in this book. Approach this book with caution and only if you've got a lot of time on your hands.