Myrtle Fillmore

Myrtle Fillmore was an American religious leader who, with her husband Charles Fillmore, co-founded the Unity movement (Unity School of Christianity) in the late 1880s.

Her own healing was the catalyst: diagnosed with tuberculosis and given a poor prognosis, she attended lectures in the Hopkins/New Thought stream and adopted the conviction—encapsulated in her famous realization, “I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness”—using sustained affirmation and prayer, after which she recovered.

That experience became the experiential seed of Unity. Myrtle Fillmore’s significance is often understated relative to Charles, but she was the movement’s spiritual heart and its first healer.

She established Unity’s healing ministry, including the “Silent Unity” prayer work, and modeled the affirmation-based, indwelling-God metaphysics that defined the organization. As a woman founder in the strongly female-shaped New Thought tradition (Eddy, Hopkins, Cady, Brooks, Militz), she is essential to the lineage that produced Unity’s enormous prosperity-and-healing literature and, downstream, modern manifestation’s affirmation practice.