LOUISE L. HAY

Recently dubbed "the closest think to a living saint" by the Australian media, Louise L. Hay is also known as one of the founders of the self-help movement. Her first book  Heal your Body was published in 1976, long before it was fashionable  to discuss the conection between mind and body. Revised and expanded in 1988, this best-selling book introduced her concepts to people in 30 different countries and 23 different languages. Through her healing techniques and positive philosophy, millions have learned how to create more of what they want in their lives, including more wellness in their bodies, minds and spirits. 

Louise Hay's personal philosophy was forged in her tormented upbringuing: an unstable, impoverished childhood and teen years marked by abuse. Born in Los Ángeles in 1927, she was only 18 months when her parents divorced. She stayed with her mother, a poor woman who, to make ends meet, began to work as a domestic, then married a rough and violent man of German origins. 

When Louise was 5 years old, an alcoholic neighbor raped her, and her parents told her it was her fault. So guilt added to the traumatic consequences of her terrible experience and, even if the rapist was condemned to 16 years of imprisonment, she feared he might come back to take revenge of her.  When she was 10, her stepfather stopped beating her and began to abuse her sexually. Five years later Louise decided she couldn't take any more abuses and run away from home. She took menial jobs to support herself and, needing to be loved but lacking in self-esteem, she winded up having sexual intercourses with anybody who gave her some attention. At 16 she became pregnant, then she gave her newborn baby girl to a childless couple for adoption, never to see her again. After that Louise came back home to take her mother to Chicago with her, leaving her younger half-sister with her step-father. After living in Chicago for some years, Louise moved to New York City, where she found a good job as a fashion model. Her life got better on the outside but having become accostumed to being despised and abused, she continued to have very low self-esteem. Nevertheless, she married a rich and educated Englishman who made her happy for 14 years, before leaving her for another woman.

Louise Hay started what would become her life's work in New York City in 1970, when to overcome her difficult moment Louise began devoting herself to spiritual practices like trascendental meditation and atending Church of Religious Science lectures and courses and began training in the ministerial program. She became a popular speaker at the church and soon found herself counseling clients, which quickly blossomed into a full-time career. 

After several years she compiled a reference guide detailing the mental causes of physical ailments and developed positive thought patterns for reversing illness and creating health. In 1976, she decided to write a book on the subject  Heal Your Body  known affectionately as "the little blue book"  which will later became in one of her best-selling titles. She began to traveling throughout the United States, lecturing and facilitating workshops on loving ourselves and healing our lives.  

Then, one day, she is diagnosed with cancer in the vaginal area. This came as no surprise to her, given her background of sexual abuse. She knew cancer was the outward manifestation of a deep resentment that nests for a long time, until it literally devours the body. She realized she still refused to let go of the rage and resentment she felt toward others because of her childhood. Therefore, since she knew cancer is something to cure from inside, first she convinced her doctor to postpone the operation for three months. "If I had the operation to get rid of my cancer and did not clear the mental process that created it, then the doctor would have been cutting Louise until there was no more Louise to cut"  she recalled, "And I didn´t like the idea" .

Here Louise Hay put her philosophy to the test. She developed an intensive program of affirmations, visualization, nutricional cleansing and psychotherapy. She began to read many books on alternative healing methods and visited alternative therapists. She practiced reflexology and, with the help of a good therapist, worked off her represed anger on pillows and mattresses. Meanwhile, to free the body of accumulated toxins, she underwent colonic washouts and followed a strict vegetarian diet. 

All these outer practices were only a reflection of the inner cleansing that was taking place. She learnt to love herself and, letting go of the resentment that was the real cause of her illness, she managed to forgive people who abused her, particurlarly her stepfather and her mother, and even felt compassion for them. 

Six months later, her cancer was completely disappeared. She was completely healed of cancer. She had miraculously healed from cancer, without surgery or chemotherapy. Now she is living proof that even an "incurable" disease can be healed if we change the way we think and believe and act.

After her extraordinary recovery, in 1980 Louise Hay left New York to return to her native Southern California, where she continued to help people with the methods she had developed through her experience.  It was here that she began putting her workshop methods on paper and in 1984 You Can Heal Your Life was published. In it, Louise Hay explains how our beliefs and ideas about ourselves often cause our emotional problems and physical maladies, and how, by using certain tools, we can change our thinking - and our lives - for the better. You Can Heal Your Life reached the New York Times best-seller list and remained on it for 12 consecutive weeks. Over three millions copies of  You Can Heal Your Life have been sold in 30 countries throughout the world. 

Thank to the huge success of her book, she started a publishing company of her own, HAYHOUSE, that began as a small venture in the living room of her home and has turned into a prosperous corporation for a yearly profit of about three million dollars, and had sold more than 10 millions books and tapes.  Hayhouse authors include such self-help movement notables as Wayne Dyer, Barbara De Angelis, Joan Borysenko, Bernie Siegel, Susan Jeffers, Alan Cohen and Stuart Wilde among others. Louise Hay also established the HAY FOUNDATION and the LOUISE L. HAY CHARITABLE FUND, non-profit organizations that support many diverse organizations, including those who dealing with AIDS, battered women and other disadvanteged individuals in our society. In 1985, Louise Hay began her famous support group, The Hayride, with six men diagnosed with AIDS. By 1988, had grown into a weekly gathering of 800 people and had moved to an auditorium in Santa Monica. Once again Louise Hay had started a movement of love and support, long before people began to wear red ribbons in their lapels. It was during this time that she wrote The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach, based on her experiences with this powerful group. 

Life. Reflections on Your Journey, was publised in 1995, followed by the audiocassette program Empowering Women. Louise Hay's most recent releases include Heal your Body A to Z, Power Thoughts for Teens, Meditations to Heal Your Life, Inner Wisdom, You Can Heal Your Life: Companion Book, Love Your Body.

In recent years Louise had finally managed to let go of the 10-hour a day, seven-day-a-week working habit to allow herself more time to enjoy in her beautiful house of Solana Beach, surrounded by an acre of land where she grows organic vegetables and raises flowers and domestic animals. Currently Louise Hay is devoting time to women's issues and enjoying her garden at her home in en San Diego, California.

"It's been hard to make time for myself" She recalls "I went through a lot of guilt. So many people were saying the needed me...and it's hard to make time for yourself when people say that. But it's essential. If I don't love myself and I don't take care of myself the best I can, I cannot really help others."

Louise Hay's healing method has been the subject of many newspapers and magazine articles. She has appeared on television around the world , and her monthly column, Dear Louise, appears in over 50 publications in the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain and Argentina. Therefore, having decided to devote more time to herself and not being a college graduate, today Louise puts most of her working energy in the training of therapists (mainly psychologists) and people willing to help from all over the world who had been certificated to teach her learnings and join them to their professional practice. Unfortunately, as it happens quite often, this has cause a "dilution" of the principles originally taught by Louise herself that she decided not to certify any more people, because many people does not take seriously, with committement and integrity the teachings, and do not respect the seriousness of an intense preparation in order to help other people and having a very poor reading of her books and without any personal practice, they pretend the certification, it's not the point to pay thousand of dollars in order to have an authorized certificate. 

Nevertheless, the basic principles of Louise Hay's philosophy  are still important, since they changed many people's way of thinking and, although essentially taken from New Thought philosophy, they have been pivotal to New Age thinking for a long time. 

The basic assumption is that any of us is 100% responsible of everything that "happens" to us. We all create our experiences through thoughts and feelings, but we deny our power by blamings others for all our frustrations. In fact, our life is but a reflection of our state of mind: if in our mind there is peace, harmony, balance, then our lives can only be harmonious, peaceful and balanced. 

What we think, then, is manifested in our lives. Louise explains that if all this sounds absurd , impossible to us, that´s because, since we were children, the "adults" around us  - feeling unhappy, scared or angry at life - have passed on to us their feeling of impotence and many negative ideas about ourselves and the world. 

Louise Hay says that, when we become "adults" ourselves, we tend to recreate the emotional environment that was typical of our familiar life, and to perpetuate, in our new relationships, the same kind of relationship we had with our parents.  

Besides, we treat ourselves just as our parents treated us. If they told us everything we did was wrong and it was always our fault if anything bad happens, then we keep on scolding and punishing ourselves even when we grow up. If, on the other hand, we've felt loved and supported as children, we continue to love and support ourselves.  

Anyway, there's no reason to blame our parents for our problems, because they receive a similar treatment from their parents, so they are also victims of other victims. They did their best, but they couldn't teach us something they didn't know. 

Louise also says that we choose our parents before birth, because they represent the limiting mental patterns we have to overcome to continue our evolution on Earth. Therefore, to forgive them is equally important as forgiving ourselves for the suffering we have unknowingly inflicted upon ourselves. Resentment is a huge obstacle to our inner evolution.  

So what we choose to think in this very moment is essential, because from these thoughts our future will spring. In fact, our experience are the outer effects of thoughts we form in our minds. And in every moment we can choose to change a thought because, as Louise says, "The moment or power is always in the present".

It's in the present moment that all the changes in our minds take place. No matter for how long we have clung to a negative thought pattern, to an illness or to an illness or to an unsatisfactory relationship, we can always choose to change here and now. 

According to Louise Hay, if we are not happy is because we think we don´t deserve happiness, since the disapproval we have met as children has become an integral, albeit unconscious, part of our way of thinking. And the more we feel frustrated, the more we see confirmations of our limiting beliefs around us. 

So, How can we leave this vicious circle? Louise recommends using "positive affirmations", which over the years have become her "trademark", since she puts lots of them for every occasion in practically all of her books.

The repetition, better in front of the mirror, of affirmations like "I love my parents and forgive them for giving me their problems", or "Now I love myself and forgive myself for not having loved myself enough in the past", for example, would help us to dissolve the resentment inside ourselves. On the other hand, repeating hundreds of times a day "I approve of myself" should have miraculous effects on our self-esteem.

In fact, if we look at affirmations more deeply, they may appear less miraculous than Louise says, and as they are based on the indisputable "power of the word" and they don't work from the mechanical repetition but from the faith of the person who pronouns them. 

This way, as Louise says, any of us can contribute to the creation of "a world where it is safe for us to love each other. It is what we all wanted as children, to be loved and accepted exactly as we were then, not when we got taller, or thinner, or prettier. But we are not going to get that from other people until we can get it from ourselves. Therefore, my message is always the same: love yourself, trust yourself. Loving yourself is the miracle cure and the path to peace"

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