Review of Invisible Acts of Power, by Caroline Myss
Invisible Acts of Power
Channeling Grace in Your Everyday Life
by Caroline Myss
Atria (Simon and Schuster), 2004. 269 pages.
Review written April 26, 2022, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review
I read this book slowly, trying to absorb a small section each day. This is a book that works well for that.
The “Acts of Power” in this book are about personal power and grace to bless others. The author solicited stories from contributors, asking them to tell about times that other people had blessed them.
Here’s how she talks about those stories. You can hear how they touched her life — and they will touch her readers’ lives as well.
In the course of writing this book, I solicited stories from readers and subscribers to my Web site about their experiences with grace and life-changing acts of service. I was honored and overwhelmed to receive twelve hundred letters within six days of making my request. I discovered that it is one thing to talk abstractly about human goodness and our potential to be kind, but it’s quite another to come into direct contact wwith hundreds of real stories of real people exercising their power to heal, to help each other, to make a difference. I felt saturated in the caring and warmth of being human that these stories convey. They are solid evidence that the great power of compassion, honor, and grace still exists, even in the middle of national and world crises. They also prove that we are not alone in this world and that even in the direst times, our prayers are heard and answered.
The stories are divided up by seven chakras — essentially how deeply the recipient was touched, going from purely physical help to deeply spiritual help. She explains how this arose naturally from the letters:
As I considered how grace, intuition, and power worked together in the stories of the people who wrote me, I noticed that most of the writers quite unconsciously categorized their letters for me by using the same or similar turns of phrases. For example, people who received assistance out of nowhere from a stranger referred to either the person or his or her story as “The Good Samaritan.” After I organized all the letters, seven categories emerged….
When seven categories emerged out of one thousand two hundred letters, I wanted to see if they might correspond with the meaning of the chakras. At first I did this out of curiosity, not really expecting that I’d find a new perspective on the architecture of the human energy system. Yet when I finished this little exercise, I discovered that just as there is a hierarchy of power, there is also a hierarchy of grace. And I realized that the call to be of service to one another, the intuition that prompts us to use our power to help others, is wired into our physical and spiritual nature.
Reading this book gave me a much deeper awareness of how my life can touch others and made me want to be more aware of intuitive promptings to be a help to other people. A very uplifting book. Reading this book was itself a blessing.
Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/invisible_acts_of_power.html
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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