Louise Hay

The teaching

Taught from her own books, above all You Can Heal Your Life (1984) and Heal Your Body (1976).

What she believed

Louise Hay sets out her teaching at the start of You Can Heal Your Life as a short creed. Each person is responsible for their own experiences; every thought is creating the future; the point of power is always in the present moment. Everyone suffers to some degree from self-hatred and guilt, and the belief beneath most troubles is the same, I am not good enough; but it is only a thought, and a thought can be changed. Resentment, criticism and guilt are the most damaging patterns. When a person truly loves and approves of themselves, she holds, everything in life works.

The house sets one thing beside this. No one is to blame for their illness or their misfortune, and a thought of not being good enough is never the cause of what happens to a person.

The probable cause

Her first book was a list. Beside each ailment it gave what she called the probable mental pattern behind it, and a new thought pattern to affirm in its place, so that a reader could look up a pain and find a belief to change. She held that every illness is created in the mind and can be released there. No study supports this, and doctors warn that it leads the sick to blame themselves and can delay treatment. The house gives her lists as what she believed, never as a guide to health, and every symptom belongs with a doctor.

Mirror work

Her central practice is mirror work. The student looks into their own eyes in a mirror, says their name and says, I love you, I really love you, and notices what rises: tears, embarrassment, contempt, the urge to look away. Those reactions show the beliefs that need loving, and she asks the student to come back to the mirror, morning and evening and whenever they pass one, until the words can be said with ease. The branch The words you repeat sets mirror work among the honest uses of affirmation.

Affirmations

An affirmation, in her teaching, is a seed. It is said in the present tense and in positive words, I am, I have, I approve, never as a wish for later or as what one does not want; it is repeated often, aloud and in writing; and it is not dug up each day to see whether it has sprouted, but tended and trusted to grow. The first she gives is willingness: I am willing to change, and I am willing to release the pattern in me that created this condition. Another is simply I approve of myself, said over and over through the day until it is believed.

Loving the self

She gives plain steps for learning to love oneself. Stop all criticism, of oneself first. Stop frightening oneself with thoughts of the worst. Be gentle, kind and patient with oneself and with one's own mind. Praise oneself for small things. Ask for support. Love even one's negative patterns, which were once ways of coping. Take care of the body, with good food and exercise. Do the mirror work. And begin now, not when the weight is lost or the work is found.

Forgiving the parents

Forgiveness is the hard centre of her teaching. She asks the student to forgive everyone, and the parents first, remembering that they too were children, hurt in their turn, and that they did the best they could with what they knew. Forgiveness does not excuse what was done; it frees the one who forgives from carrying it. She often leads the student back to the child they once were, to comfort that child as a loving parent would.

Love in the room

Her weekly meetings for men with AIDS put the teaching into practice when many turned away from them. They gathered to share, to meditate and to say affirmations of love and self-approval together, and she asked each to meet their illness with love rather than shame. The claim that such love heals the body is hers and is not borne out, and the house holds firmly that her practices are a companion to medical care, never a substitute for it.