You Can Heal Your Life is one of the best-selling non-fiction book of all time with 35 million copies sold worldwide in over 30 languages. Louise explains how limiting beliefs and ideas are often the cause of illness, and how you can change your thinking…and improve the quality of your life! Louise was raped an old wino neighbour and the man was sentenced to 15 years in prison. At 15, she dropped out of University High School in Los Angeles without a diploma, became pregnant and, on her 16th birthday, gave up her newborn baby girl for adoption.
Sometimes what seems to be a big tragedy turns out to become the greatest good in our lives.
Louis Hay’s Philosophy
- We are each responsible for all of our experiences.
- Every thought we think is creating our future.
- The point of power is always in the present moment.
- Everyone suffers from self-hatred and guilt.
- The bottom line for everyone is, “I’m not good enough.”
- It’s only a thought, and a thought can be changed.
- We create every so-called illness in our body.
- Resentment, criticism, and guilt are the most damaging patterns.
- Releasing resentment will dissolve even cancer.
- We must release the past and forgive everyone.
- We must be willing to begin to learn to love ourselves.
- Self-approval and self-acceptance in the now are the keys to positive changes.
- When we really love ourselves, everything in our life works.
We create the situations, and then we give our power away by blaming the other person for our frustration. No person, no place, and no thing has any power over us, for “we” are the only thinkers in our mind. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our minds, we will find it in our lives.
We are all victims of victims
We are all victims of victims, and they could not possibly have taught us anything they did not know. If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself.
They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children. If you want to understand your parents more, get them to talk about their own childhood; and if you listen with compassion, you will learn where their fears and rigid patterns come from. Those people who “did all that stuff to you” were just as frightened and scared as you are.
“We learn our belief systems as very little children, and then we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs. Look back in your own life and notice how often you have gone through the same experience.”
The Point of Power Is Always in the Present Moment
All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by your thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past. They were created by the thoughts and words you used yesterday, last week, last month, last year, 10, 20, 30, 40, or more years ago, depending on how old you are.
However, that is your past. It is over and done with. What is important in this moment is what you are choosing to think and believe and say right now. For these thoughts and words will create your future. Your point of power is in the present moment and is forming the experience of tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and so on.
The more self-hatred and guilt we have, the less our lives work. The less self-hatred and guilt we have, the better our lives work, on all levels.
To Release the Past, We Must Be Willing to Forgive
We need to choose to release the past and forgive everyone, ourselves included. We may not know how to forgive, and we may not want to forgive, but the very fact that we say we are willing to forgive begins the healing process. It is imperative for our own healing that “we” release the past and forgive everyone.
The Tyranny of Shoulds
“You see, I believe that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use should, we are, in effect, saying “wrong.” Either we are wrong or we were wrong or we are going to be wrong. I don’t think we need more wrongs in our life. We need to have more freedom of choice. I would like to take the word should and remove it from the vocabulary forever. I’d replace it with the word could. Could gives us choice, and we are never wrong.”
The Universe totally supports every thought we choose to think and to believe. When we are little, we learn how to feel about ourselves and about life by the reactions of the adults around us. Whatever these beliefs are, they will be recreated as experiences as we grow up. However, we are only dealing with thought patterns, and the point of power is always in the present moment. Changes can begin in this moment.
If you know better, you would do better
Think of a rose from the time it is a tiny bud. As it opens to full flower, till the last petal falls, it is always beautiful, always perfect, always changing. So it is with us. We are always perfect, always beautiful, and ever changing. We are doing the best we can with the understanding, awareness and knowledge we have. As we gain more understanding, awareness and knowledge, then we will do things differently.
Seeing Yourself as a Child
Each one of us has a three-year-old child within us, and we often spend most of our time yelling at that kid in ourselves. Then we wonder why our lives don’t work.
We base our life script on our early messages. We are all good little children and obediently accept what “they” tell us as truth. It would be very easy just to blame our parents and be victims for the rest of our lives. But that wouldn’t be much fun, and it certainly wouldn’t get us out of our stuck position.
Blaming Your Family
Blame is one of the surest ways to stay in a problem. In blaming another, we give away our power. Understanding enables us to rise above the issue and take control of our future.
The past cannot be changed. The future is shaped by our current thinking. It is imperative for our freedom to understand that our parents were doing the best they could with the understanding, awareness, and knowledge they had. Whenever we blame someone else, we are not taking responsibility for ourselves.
Those people who did all those terrible things to us were just as frightened and scared as you are. They felt just the same helplessness as you do. The only things they could possibly teach you are what they had been taught.
Listening to Others
- Our early friends share their own misinformation about life with us. The other kids at school can tease us and leave lasting hurts.
- Neighbors also have an influence, not only because of their remarks but also because we’re asked, “What will the neighbors think?” Think back to the other authority figures who were influential in your childhood.
- And, of course, there are the strong and very persuasive statements made by advertisements in periodicals and on television. All too many products are sold by making us feel we are unworthy or wrong if we don’t use them.
“We are all here to transcend our early limitations, whatever they were. We’re here to recognize our own magnificence and divinity no matter what they told us. You have your negative beliefs to overcome, and I have my negative beliefs to overcome.”
Examine Your Thoughts
Whatever we believe becomes true for us. If you have a sudden financial disaster, then on some level you may believe you are unworthy of being comfortable with money, or you believe in burdens and debt. Or if you believe that nothing good ever lasts, maybe you believe that life is out to get you, or, as I hear so often, “I just can’t win.
Whatever the problem is, it comes from a thought pattern, and thought patterns can be changed.
Each Moment Is a New Beginning
The Point of Power is always in the present moment. You are never stuck. This is where the changes take place, right here and right now in our own minds! It doesn’t matter how long we’ve had a negative pattern or an illness or a poor relationship or lack of finances or self-hatred. We can begin to make a shift today!
Your problem no longer needs to be the truth for you. It can now fade back to the nothingness from whence it came. You can do it
Our minds create our future. When we have something in our present that is undesirable, then we must use our minds to change the situation. And we can begin to change it this very second.
Whatever you give out comes back to you. The more you give out anger, the more you are creating situations for you to get angry at, like sitting in a corner with a dunce cap on, getting nowhere.
Make a Decision to Be “Willing to Change”
If you really want to know how stubborn you are, just approach the idea of being willing to change. We all want to have our lives change, to have situations become better and easier, but we don’t want to have to change. We would prefer that they change. In order to have this happen, we must change inside. We must change our way of thinking, change our way of speaking, change our way of expressing ourselves. Only then will the outer changes occur.
Be willing to allow the changes to happen when they come up in your life. Be aware that where you DO NOT WANT TO CHANGE is exactly the area where you NEED to change the most. “I am willing to change.
Awareness Is the First Step in Healing or Changing
When we have some pattern buried deeply within us, we must become aware of it in order to heal the condition. Perhaps we begin to mention the condition, to complain about it or to see it in other people. It rises to the surface of our attention in some way, and we begin to relate to it. We often attract a teacher, a friend, a class or workshop, or a book to ourselves that begins to awaken new ways to approach the dissolving of the problem.
We all have lessons to learn. The things that are so difficult for us are only the lessons we have chosen for ourselves. If things are easy for us, then they are not lessons, but are things we already know.
Lessons Can Be Learned Through Awareness
If you think of the hardest thing for you to do and how much you resist it, then you’re looking at your greatest lesson at the moment. Surrendering, giving up the resistance, and allowing yourself to learn what you need to learn, will make the next step even easier. Don’t let your resistance stop you from making the changes. We can work on two levels: 1) Looking at the resistance, and 2) Still making the mental changes. Observe yourself, watch how you resist, and then go ahead anyway.
“Too often instead of working on our own changes, we decide which of our friends needs to change. This, too, is resistance.”
Leave Your Friends Alone
When something works well for us, we often want to share it with others. But they may not be ready to make a change at that point in time and space. It’s hard enough to make changes when we want to, but to try to make someone else change when he or she doesn’t want to is impossible, and it can ruin a good friendship. I push my clients because they come to me. I leave my friends alone.
Repeated Patterns Show Us Our Needs
For every habit we have, for every experience we go through over and over, for every pattern we repeat, there is a NEED WITHIN US for it. The need corresponds to some belief we have. If there were not a need, we wouldn’t have it, do it, or be it. There is something within us that needs the fat, the poor relationships, the failures, the cigarettes, the anger, the poverty, the abuse, or whatever there is that’s a problem for us.
Whatever we are trying to release in our lives is just a symptom, an outer effect. Trying to eliminate the symptom without working on dissolving the cause is useless. The moment we release our willpower or discipline, the symptom crops up again.
Your Mind Is a Tool
You are much more than your mind. You may think your mind is running the show. But that is only because you have trained your mind to think in this way. You can also untrain and retrain this tool of yours.
Your mind is a tool for you to use in any way you wish. The way you now use your mind is only a habit, and habits, any habits, can be changed if we want to do so, or even if we only know it is possible to do so.”
The thoughts you “choose” to think create the experiences you have. If you believe that it is hard or difficult to change a habit or a thought, then your choice of this thought will make it true for you. If you would choose to think, “It is becoming easier for me to make changes,” then your choice of this thought will make that true for you.
Your old thoughts are gone; there is nothing you can do about them except live out the experiences they caused. Your current thought, the one you are thinking right now, is totally under your control.
Fighting the negative is a total waste of time if you really want to make changes in your life. The more you dwell on what you don’t want, the more of it you create. The things about yourself or your life that you have always disliked are probably still with you.
Thoughts have no power over us unless we give in to them. Thoughts are only words strung together. They have NO MEANING WHATSOEVER. Only we give meaning to them. Let us choose to think thoughts that nourish and support us.
It is not what happens, it is how we react to it. We are each responsible for all our experiences. What beliefs about yourself do you need to change in order to attract more loving kinds of behavior?”
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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