| HALL OF FAME: Louise L. Hay by Annalisa & Giampiero Cara We start our gallery of New Age celebrities with the most famous representative of "positive thinking". Here's the portrait of an extraordinary woman. She's miraculously healed from cancer, without surgery or chemotherapy. Her most important book, You Can Heal Your Life, has been translated in more than 20 languages and has sold more than three million copies in 30 countries. The publishing company she founded in 1984 has sold more than ten million books - not counting the many audio and video cassettes it produces - for a yearly profit of about three million dollars. Her column, "Dear Louise", is currently published in more than 30 magazines in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Australia, Spain and Italy. She isn't a college graduate, yet physicians, scientists and psychologists from all over the world attend her Institute to integrate their professional training with her teachings. Such extraordinary results speak of an extraordinary woman, Louise L.Hay. She's still undoubtedly a leading figure in the New Age movement, although in recent years she has decided to live a more retired life and her books have lost a substantial part of their original strength. A difficult life Born in Los Angeles 72 years ago, she's only 18 months old when her parents divorce. She stays with her mother, a poor woman who, to make ends meet, begins to work as a domestic, then marries a rough and violent man of German origins. When Louise is five years old, an alcoholic neighbor rapes her, and her parents tell her it's her fault. So guilt adds to the traumatic consequences of her terrible experience and, even if the rapist is condemned to 16 years of imprisonment, she fears he might come back to take revenge on her. When she's ten, her stepfather stops beating her and begins to abuse her sexually. Five years later, Louise decides she can't take any more abuses and runs away from home. She takes menial jobs to support herself and, needing to be loved but lacking in self-esteem, she winds up having sexual intercourses with anybody who gives her some attention. At 16, she becomes pregnant, then gives her newborn baby girl to a childless couple for adoption, never to see her again. After that, Louise comes back home to take her mother to Chicago with her, leaving her younger half-sister with her stepfather. After living in Chicago for some years, Louise moves to New York City, where she finds a good job as a fashion model. Her life gets better on the outside but, having become accustomed to being despised and abused, she continues to have very low self-esteem. Nevertheless, she marries a rich and educated Englishman who makes her happy for 14 years, before leaving her for another woman. The spiritual awakening In 1970, to overcome her difficult moment, Louise begins devoting herself to spiritual practices like transcendental meditation and attending Church of Religious Science lectures and courses in New York. Here, she begins to study the psychological and spiritual causes of illnesses and, in 1976, she decides to write a book on the subject, Heal Your Body, which will later become, in its revised expanded edition (with audio-cassette) one of her best-selling titles. But even that first edition of the book becomes successful and Louise is asked to do a lecture tour in various States. Then, one day, she is diagnosed with a cancer in the vaginal area. This comes as no surprise to her, given her background of sexual abuse. She knows cancer is the outward manifestation of a deep resentment that nests for a long time, until it literally devours the body. She realizes she still refuses to let go of the rage and the resentment she feels toward others because of her childhood. Therefore, since she knows cancer is something to cure from inside, first she convinces 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 recalls now. "And I didn't like the idea." "Miraculous" Healing Then she begins to read many books on alternative healing methods and visits alternative therapists. She practices reflexology and, with the help of a good therapist, works off her repressed anger on pillows and mattresses. Meanwhile, to free the body of accumulated toxins, she undergoes colonic washouts and follows a strict vegetarian diet. But all these outer practices are only a reflection of the inner cleansing that's taking place. She learns to love herself and, letting go of the resentment that was the real cause of her illness, she manages to forgive people who abused her, particularly her stepfather and her mother, and even feel compassion for them. Six months later, her cancer has completely disappeared. Now she is living proof that even an "incurable" disease can be healed if we change the way we think and believe and act. Success After her extraordinary recovery, in 1980 Louise leaves New York to return to her native California, where she continues to help people with the methods she has developed through her experience. In 1984, she publishes her most important book, the already mentioned You Can Heal Your Life, in which she explains how it's possible to heal our body and spirit changing our deeply-rooted limiting beliefs about ourselves. Thanks to the huge success of her book, she starts a publishing company of her own, Hay House, and in 1985 begins to work with people diagnosed with AIDS. Her weekly group rapidly grows until Louise has 800 people turning up for her meetings, which become known as the "Hay Ride." From this experience, in 1988 she writes another successful book titled The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach. In recent years, Louise has finally managed to let go of the 10-hour a day, seven-day-a-week working habit to allow herself more time to enjoy life in her beautiful house in Solana Beach, surrounded by an acre of land where she grows organic vegetables and raises flowers and domestic animals. She still writes books at a regular pace and is president of a publishing house, the aforementioned Hay House, which publishes the works of dozens of renowned New Age authors, including Bernie Siegel, Susan Jeffreys, Wayne Dyer, Alan Cohen and Joan Borysenko. "It's been hard to make time for myself," she recalls now. "I went through a lot of guilt. So many people were saying they 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." The fundamentals of Positive Thinking Therefore, having decided to devote more time to herself, today Louise puts most of her working energy in the training of therapists (mainly psychologists) who attend the Hay Institute. Those therapists then travel the world to give seminars on Louise Hay's teaching. Unfortunately, as it happens quite often, this has caused a "dilution" of the principles originally taught by Louise herself, for the people who now teach them have only a second and often third-hand knowledge of them. And the seminars they attend to are open to anybody who is willing to pay thousands of dollars to earn the qualification of "teacher authorized by the Hay Institute." Nevertheless, the basic principles of 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 him. We all create our experiences through thoughts and feelings, but we deny our power by blaming 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 lives, and to perpetuate, in our new relationships, the same kind of relationship we had with our parents. Besides, we treat ourselves just like our parents treated us. If they told us everything we did was wrong and it was always our fault if anything bad happened, 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 received 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 chose 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 experiences 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 of 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 unsatisfactory relationship, we can always choose to change here and now. The affirmations According to Louise Hay, if we're 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 if in front of a 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 affirmation more deeply, they may appear less miraculous than Louise Hay wants us to believe. They also come from New Thought teachings, and are based on the indisputable "power of the word" the great metaphysic Florence Scovell Shinn wrote about in the 20's. Yet Louise seems to forget that "power words" stem not from the mechanical repetition of phrases somebody else suggested, but from the faith of the person who pronounces them. Louise says that faith is a consequence, not a prerequisite of this method, because she thinks our creative power is in the hands of a stupid unconscious, unable to tell the things we really think from those we repeat to make it believe us. This is the weakest point in Hay's teaching, for it sharpens the illusory separation between the "conscious" and the "unconscious", in the questionable attempt to resolve it through self-deception. Nevertheless, Louise Hay's ideas can be effective to help us discover the creative power of our thoughts and change our life for the better by feeding ourselves with positive thoughts. 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." Copyright © 1999 Annalisa & Giampiero Cara | 
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