Louise Hay is about to pick up the telephone. But first, while her caller is on hold, Hay pauses to give herself a little pep talk, one of many she has given herself since she first opened her eyes early this morning.
"This will be easy and effortless," she instructs herself as her hand reaches for the receiver. "We will connect on a wonderful level."Now she is ready to be interviewed.
Hay is America's guru of self-healing. Her book "You Can Heal Your Life" sat at the top of the New York Times best-seller list of self-help books for 14 weeks last year. She claims to have cured herself of cancer. She runs a $2 million business. She leads support groups for people with AIDS that draw 800 people a week. And this all happened, she says, because she told herself it would.
If we want to be healthy, prosperous, successful and loved, she says, we have to work at it. First we have to think that we are all those things - think it in daily "affirmations" - and then eventually we will be.
It's sort of Rene Descartes' "I think therefore I am" with a New Age spin. Unlike Descartes, Hay isn't worried about proving her existence. What she cares about is making that existence healthy, prosperous and loving.
"By changing our thoughts," she believes, "we can change what we experience."
It's not a new concept. But Hay, a 61-year-old former model, has taken the notion of positive thinking and turned it into something very concrete.
Hay believes that negative patterns of thinking bring negative results, including disease and even what the rest of us would call bad luck. But not just any disease or any bad luck. Hay's theory is that our bodies are more specific than that. If you have cancer, she says, you probably are carrying around long-standing resentments. If you have arthritis you feel unloved. If you have a leg problem you have a fear of moving forward in your life. Even if you are accident-prone or abused, says Hay, the cause lies within your thoughts. And the same goes for problems you may have with money.
If this all sounds a little too simplistic, that doesn't bother Hay, a positive thinking extremist who is firm in her belief that our bodies are a lot more literal than we realize - and that the universe takes us at face value.
"If I want to believe that life is lonely and that nobody loves me, then that is what I will find in my world," she says. "If we choose to believe that we are helpless victims and that it's all hopeless, then the universe will support us in that belief."
According to Hay, the medical profession is edging toward a belief in the connection attitude and health, and between attitude and healing, as evidenced by cancer surgeon Bernie Siegel's best-selling book "Love, Medicine and Miracles."
"It's amazing the number of medical people who recognize the mind-body connection," says Hay. "It's slow, but it's coming. It's growing."
She stresses that she never counsels people not to see a doctor if they are ill. "But healing needs to be a teamwork kind of thing," she insists. "You need to do your part to make sure you won't get sick again."
One way to do this, she says, is through affirmations - the repetition of positive phrases.
Hay begins her own affirmations as soon as she wakes each morning. One she particularly recommends is "I approve of myself," a phrase that should be repeated at least 300 to 400 times a day for the first month. "No, it's not too many times," she writes. "When you are worrying, you go over your problem at least that many times." The best way to say these affirmations, she says, is into a mirror.
For specific maladies - everything from abdominal cramps to impacted wisdom teeth, and heart attacks to diabetes - Hay suggests specific affirmations (for the wisdom teeth, for example: "I open my consciousness to the expansion of life. There is plenty of space for me to grow and change.")
At the root of most problems, says Hay, is a lack of self-love. For most people, she adds, that lack began when they were small children. She says that since writing "You Can Heal Your Life" in 1984 she has come to realize even more how important it is for people to "make peace with their inner child."
Hay's own inner child was abused emotionally and physically by a stepfather and raped by a neighbor when she was 5. The message she got from those experiences, she says now, was that they were her fault. As a teenager she ran away from home, got pregnant and gave up the child for adoption.
And then things seemed to get better for Hay. She moved to New York and became a high-fashion model for designers such as Bill Blass and Oleg Cassini. She married a wealthy Englishman and dined at the White House. But inside, says Hay, she still felt like an abused child and, before long, old patterns emerged. Her husband divorced her. She was diagnosed with vaginal cancer.
It was after her diagnosis that Hay began to put to the test a new set of beliefs she had encountered in New York at the Church of Religious Science, a religion based on the premise that our thoughts create our reality. According to Hay, at the end of six months of spiritual, emotional and nutritional healing, her doctors told her that her cancer was gone.
Hay believes that others can heal themselves, too, even the hundreds of AIDS patients she meets with each week at what has come to be known as the Hayride. They meet on Wednesday nights in a building in West Hollywood Park to hear what you don't hear too many other places - the positive side of AIDS. According to Hay, "there are many people (with AIDS) who are stabilizing" as a result of self-healing techniques such as affirmations and visualization.
For her work with people with AIDS, Hay received, along with Elizabeth Taylor, the first "From the Heart" award presented by the AIDS Hospice Foundation of Los Angeles.
Despite the worldwide attention her AIDS work has received, Hay wants people to know that self-healing is for everybody who wants more out of life. But she doesn't claim to have the only answer.
"No one method or one person or one group has all the answers for everyone," she writes. "I don't have all the answers for everyone. I am just one more stepping stone on the pathway to holistic health."
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(Additional information)
Louise Hay to speak
Louise Hay will speak on Friday, Aug. 4, at the Salt Lake Hilton from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. For more information call 277-5352, 261-4706 and 322-1162.