"Why People Don't Heal and How They Can" shows how choosing to stay stuck in woundology often comes at a terrible price: the loss of health. "We are given a finite amount of energy to run our physical bodies, our minds, and our emotions, as well as to manage our external environments, " says Myss. "When we choose to siphon off some of this energy to keep negative events in our histories alive, we are robbing that energy from our cell tissue, making ourselves vulnerable to the development of disease." Once this path is seen as the true energy debt that it is, choosing health means choosing to release the weight of the past. Too often, this is something that people just can't or won't do.

While the practice of woundology is a common source of illness, personal negativity is not always the cause; as contradictory as it seems, sometimes illness can be the answer to prayer. "Our spiritual development is meant to culminate in an ability to see things impersonally, to recognize the greater meaning of life's challenges apart from the literal events, " says Myss. "To that end, illness can physically guide us onto a path of insight and learning upon which we would otherwise never have set foot. It is an unparallelled catalyst for expanding personal consciousness." "Why People Don't Heal" details the intended path of one's spiritual evolution, asserting that it is a microcosm of the spiritualdevelopment of humankind over the ages. "With each astrological age (which lasts about 2,000 years), human consciousness develops in new ways, " says Myss. "During each age a particular kind of energy dominates, and it affects people's lives, health, and spiritual outlooks, leading to certain perceptions about the nature of reality and the power of the human spirit." Since the ladder of awareness that humankind has climbed over centuries is the same one each of us is meant to ascend in our own individual lifetime, we can then study the spiritual lessons of the ages of Aries (Tribal power), Pisces (Individual), and Aquarius (Symbolic) and apply them to our own human natures; to fail to do so has distinct health consequences.

After describing the reasons why people don't heal, Myss delves into how they can; the first step often consists of calling one's spirit back, retrieving one's energy from the places it has gotten "stuck" in one's past. In practical terms, this means learning to see that difficult experiences are meant to be learned from, and gotten over. "Why People Don't Heal and How They Can" also details the process of learning to read the body, recognizing that its illnesses are very specific expressions of particular spiritual issues (an idea Myss introduced in her bestselling book "Anatomy of The Spirit" ). In every case, seeing the spiritual lesson that underlies any illness requires a shift in consciousness. "I believe that all illnesses can b