Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Calling Your Spirit Back
To deliberately withdraw your attention from past grievances and future worries and bring it back to the present, where you can actually act.
Calling Your Spirit Back in 5 lines: Ask “Where is my spirit right now?” Notice where your attention has leaked — a past grievance, a future worry. Name it. Consciously call your energy back to the present and disempower the story you handed it to. Then put your reclaimed attention onto something you can actually act on now — and repeat whenever the mind drifts back. (Energy talk is metaphor; the skill is attention. Not a cure for illness.)
What it is
“Calling your spirit back” is Caroline Myss’s practice of deliberately withdrawing your attention from the past and the future and returning it to the present moment, where — she argues — your power to act actually lives.
Her image is energetic: she describes “spirit” as a quantity of personal energy that we unwittingly leak into old grievances, regrets, and unfinished business, and into anxious rehearsals of the future, so that less of us is here and now.
The remedy is a simple act of attention — noticing where your energy has gone, and calling it back. Stripped of the energy metaphor, this is an attentional practice (The Inner Creates the Outer): catching yourself replaying the past or rehearsing the future, and reorienting to the present (Everything Happens in the Now), which frees up the resources you were spending on what you cannot change so you can apply them to what you can (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
Drawn from Anatomy of the Spirit (1996) and Myss’s daily-practice teaching. The faithful sequence:
- Ask the diagnostic question: “Where is my spirit right now?” Notice honestly where your attention and energy are. Are you here, in the present, or are you in a memory, a grievance, a regret, an old argument, or a worried future scene?
- Name where your energy is invested. Myss’s view: “Transmitting energy into the past by dwelling on painful events drains power from your present-day body.” Identify the specific past event, person, or future fear that is currently pulling on you.
- Consciously call your spirit / energy back. Make a deliberate inner movement of withdrawing your attention and energy from that story and returning it to the present moment. Some people use a literal silent instruction — “I call my spirit back to the present” — others simply re-place attention on the breath, the body, or the task in front of them.
- Disempower the choice that drained you. In her evening-review form, Myss suggests reviewing the day for what drained your energy, calling your spirit back, and consciously withdrawing the power you handed to that event or person — including, where relevant, words spoken without integrity.
- Return to present-time action. Having reclaimed your attention, put it to use on something you can actually influence now. Myss frames present-time energy as the condition for clear intuition and good choices: she warns that “it is unnatural to our Divine design to allow our thoughts to live too long in the past.”
- Repeat through the day. Attention wanders back to old stories repeatedly; the practice is the repeated act of noticing and recalling, not a one-time fix. (Sourcing note: the question “where is my spirit?”, the leak/recall metaphor, and the evening-review steps reflect Myss’s published teaching, attributed and paraphrased; short quotes are marked.)
Source & Lineage
Caroline Myss (b. 1952) is an American author who describes herself as a “medical intuitive.” The practice sits inside the framework of Anatomy of the Spirit (1996), which synthesizes the Hindu chakras, the Christian sacraments, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and advances her thesis that “your biography becomes your biology.” The recall-your-energy idea echoes a widely shared cross-cultural intuition — e.g. shamanic “soul retrieval,” to which she alludes via the story of the Navajo artist David Chetlahe Paladin — recast in her energy-anatomy language.
The Traditions' versions
Present-moment teaching (Eckhart Tolle) — withdrawing attention from “psychological time” (past/future) into the Now.,
- “Here and now” concentration (New Thought) — bringing the mind out of past/future into the present.
- Recapitulation (Castaneda lineage) — systematically reviewing the past to “recover” the energy left in old encounters.
- Breath as anchor to now (mindfulness) — using the breath to return attention to the present.
- Letting go of the past (release work) — relinquishing the grip of old events.
Common refinements
Using it to suppress, not process. “Calling your spirit back” from a grief or trauma is not a license to bypass it; some feelings need to be felt and worked through, sometimes with help. Reorient after acknowledging, not to avoid acknowledging.
- Treating it as one-and-done. Attention drifts back; the value is in the repeated micro-practice across the day.
- Swallowing the illness claim. Don’t conclude that you “caused” your condition by dwelling on the past — reject the blame; use the attention skill on its own terms.
- Vagueness. “Be present” is too abstract to act on; the specific question “Where is my spirit right now?” and naming the exact story makes it operational.