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You Can Heal Your Life

You Can Heal Your Life

by Louise Hay
 
With its almost child-like motif of a rainbow-colored heart on the cover, You Can Heal Your Life offers a message of nonjudgmental love and support that has endeared it to people everywhere. In ten years it has sold three million copies in 30 countries, and Hay is now a matriarch of the self-help, New Age, and holistic healing movements. She attributes the book’s success simply to her ability to “help people change without laying guilt on them” and the book has the calmness of a person who has gone through the worst and survived. The title only really makes sense when we read the final chapter, a plain-speaking record of Hay’s personal history.
 

Hay’s story

Hay’s mother tried early on to foster her out. Raped by a neighbor at five years old, she continued to be sexually abused until the age of 15, when she left home and school to become a waitress in a diner. She gave birth to a girl a year later, but the child was adopted and she never saw her again. Hay left for Chicago, spending a few years in menial work, before basing herself in New York, becoming a fashion model. There she met an “educated, English gentleman” and married him, leading an elegant and stable lifestyle until, 14 years on, he met someone else and divorced her. A chance attendance at a Church of Religious Science meeting changed Hay’s life. She became a certified church counselor and subsequently a transcendental meditator, after attending the Maharishi’s International University in Iowa.
After becoming a minister and developing her own counseling service, Hay wrote a book called Heal Your Body, which detailed metaphysical causes of bodily illness. At this point she was told that she had cancer, but was healed through a combination of radically changed diet and mental techniques. After spending most of her life on the East Coast, she moved back to LA and was reunited with her mother before the latter’s death. Now in her 70s, Hay is one of the world’s bestknown motivational speakers and writers, often touring with the likes of Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and James Redfield.
 

The book

You Can Heal Your Life is the message of a person who has crawled out of victimhood, and this aspect of it has had enormous appeal, particularly to women with similar histories. The essence of Hay’s teaching is love of the self and evaporation of guilt, a process she believes makes us mentally free and physically healthy, as the study of psycho-immunology attests.
All the familiar self-help messages are given attention, including breaking free of limiting thoughts, replacing fear with faith, forgiveness, and understanding that thoughts really do create experiences. Some of the main points are:
 
  • Disease (or “dis-ease,” as Hay calls it) is the product of states of mind. She believes that the inability to forgive is the root cause of all illness.
  • Healing requires us to release the pattern of thought that has led to our present condition. The “problem” is rarely the real issue. The superficial things that we don’t like about ourselves mask a deeper belief that we are “not good enough.” Genuinely loving the self (but not in a narcissistic way) is the basis for all self-healing. Chapter 15 lists just about every illness and its likely corresponding mental “blockage.” Skeptics may find the list remarkably accurate if they open their minds a little.
  • Affirmations are about remembering our true self and utilizing its power. Therefore, trust in the power of affirmations to manifest what you want. They must always be positive and in the present tense; for example, “I am totally healthy” or “Marvelous work opportunities are coming to me.” The book contains many affirmations to choose from.
  • “Whatever we concentrate on increases, so don’t concentrate on your bills.” You will only create more of them. Gratefulness for what you do have makes it more abundant. Become aware of the limitless supply of the universe—observe nature! Your income is only a channel of prosperity, not its source.
  • “Your security is not your job, or your bank account, or your investments, or your spouse, or parents. Your security is your ability to connect with the cosmic power that creates all things.” If you have the ability to still your mind and invoke feelings of peace by realizing you are not alone, you can never really feel insecure again.
  • One of the first things Hay says to people who come to see her is “Stop criticizing yourself!” We may have spent a lifetime doing this, but the beginning of real self-love—one of the main ingredients in healing your life—happens when we decide to give ourselves a break.
 

Final comments

You Can Heal Your Life will not be for everyone. It is quite New Age, fitting into the “journey to wholeness” mold of writing that is now so common, though Hay was a pioneer. For those who have read a number of self-development books, it may seem a little simplistic and contain nothing new; it is certainly no intellectual undertaking to read. On the other hand, it has a directness and enthusiasm that help it stay in the mind, and it intuitively makes sense.
In the true spirit of self-help, the book is not content to fix problems but to strip all authority from them. This outlook, which on first consideration seems naïve, is in fact philosophically rigorous: Dwell on your problems and they become insurmountable; consider your possibilities and they provide hope and motivation. Millions have had similarly difficult lives to Hay, but not everyone has the will to leave their problems behind or even the knowledge that they can; deprivation forms the illusion that “this is all there is.” Hay’s insistence to herself that pain and setbacks would not define her led her out of multiple psychological black holes. Her book has the credibility of the successful escapee.
 

Louise Hay

Hay has spent a lot of time working with people with AIDS through the Hayride Support Group. In 1988 she wrote The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach. Her first book was Heal Your Body and later works include Gratitude: A Way of Life and Millennium 2000, both with numerous contributors, and Empowering Women: Every Woman’s Guide to Successful Living, along with many audio and videotapes.
Now a small farmer and organic gardener, Hay is still doing select tours, and her “Dear Louise” syndicated column is published in over 30 magazines in the US and elsewhere.
The power of thought >You Can Heal Your Life
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