You Can Heal Your Life

Biography of Louise L Hay
(Sourced from Wikipedia and Louise Hay’s website)

Through Louise’s 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.

Hay recounted her life story in an interview with Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times in May 2008.[1] In it Hay stated that she was born in Los Angeles to a poor mother who remarried Louise’s violent stepfather. She recounted that when she was about 5, she was raped by a neighbor. At 15 she dropped out of high school without a diploma, became pregnant and, on her 16th birthday, gave up her newborn baby girl for adoption. She then recalled she moved to Chicago, where she worked in low-paying jobs. In 1950 she moved on again – to New York. She explained that at this point she changed her name and began a career as a fashion model. She achieved success, working for Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini and Pauline Trigère. In 1954 she married the English businessman Andrew Hay, but went on to tell how, after 14 years of marriage, she felt devastated when the marriage ended.[1]

Hay said that about this time she found the First Church of Religious Science on 48th Street, which taught her the transformative power of thought. Hay revealed that here she studied the New Thought works of authors likeFlorence Scovel Shinn, who claimed that positive thinking could change people’s material circumstances, and the Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body.[2]

By Hay’s account, in the early 1970s she became a Religious Science practitioner. In this role she led people in spoken affirmations, which she believes would cure their illnesses, and became popular as a workshop leader. She also recalled how she had studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.[3]

Hay described how in 1977 or 1978 she was diagnosed with “incurable” cervical cancer, and how she came to the conclusion that by holding on to her resentment for her childhood abuse and rape she had contributed to its onset. She reported how she had refused conventional medical treatment, and began a regime of forgiveness, coupled with therapy, nutrition, developed an intensive program of affirmations, visualization, nutritional cleansing, psychotherapy, reflexology and occasional enemas. She claimed in the interview that she rid herself of the cancer by this method, but, while swearing to its truth, declared that there is no doctor left alive who can confirm this story.[1] Within six months, she was completely healed of cancer.

In 1976, Hay wrote her first book Heal Your Body, which began as a small pamphlet containing a list of different bodily ailments and their “probable” metaphysical causes.[1] This pamphlet was later enlarged and extended into her book You Can Heal Your Life, published in 1984 [4][broken citat