You Can Heal Your Life offers a message of non-judgmental love and support that has endangered it to people everywhere. The author attributes the book’s success simply to her ability to help people change without laying guilt on them and in fact the book has the calmness of a person who has gone through the worst and survived. This is a survivor narrative, and the title only really makes sense when we read the final chapter, a plain-speaking record of Louise Hay’s difficult personal history.
The book teaches love of the self and evaporation of guilt, which makes us mentally free and physically healthy, as the study of psycho-immunology attests. Affirmations are vital in becoming the person we wish to be, and the book contains many to choose from. All the familiar self-help messages are given attention, including breaking free of limiting thoughts, replacing fear with faith, forgiveness, and understanding that thoughts really do create experiences.
The main idea or can say the key idea of this book is “if we are ready to do our mental work, then almost anything can be healed”. The issues about which Louise talk about in this book is related to relationship, money, body and all of these issues starts with the belief that we are not good enough, and we just can’t do anything and this is our belief which creates and forms our lives, and the fact is the moment we start loving ourselves is the moment we have the ability or can say have the key to heal ourselves.
With proper and right mental work, we can heal almost every aspect of our lives and can bring a positive outcome in any area we desire. Hay has written this book the same way she would have taken the client through sessions or a workshop. Each chapter starts with an affirmation and includes one or more exercises and treatments.
Some of the main points are: -
Disease (or ‘dis–ease’) is the product of states and mind. The inability to forgive is the cause of the illness.
Prosperity: Whatever we concentrate on increases, so don’t concentrate on your bills. You will only create more of them. Gratefulness for what you do have makes it more abundant. Become aware of the limitless supply of the universe – observe nature! Your income is only a channel of prosperity, not its source.
Security: Your security is not your job or your bank account, or your investments or your parents or your spouse. Your security is your ability to connect with the cosmic power that creates all things. If you have the ability to still your mind and invoke feelings of peace by realizing you are not alone, you can never really feel insecure again.
Self – love: One of the first things Hay will say to people who come to see her stops criticizing yourself! We may have spent a lifetime doing this, but the beginning of real self-love which is one of the main ingredients in healing your life happens when we decide to give ourselves a break.
This book will not be for everyone. It is quite New Agey, fitting into the journey to wholeness mold of writing that is now so common, but remember that Hay was a pioneer of it. For those who have read a number of self-development books, it may seem a bit simplistic and contain nothing new – it is certainly no intellectual undertaking to read it. On the other hand, it has a directness and enthusiasm that makes it stay in the mind, and intuitively makes sense.
