Review: You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay

You Can Heal Your Life is one of those books I re-read on a regular basis. It is the ultimate self-help and inspirational book that everyone should run, not walk to their bookstore to get. The premise of the book is to get one to have a more positive mind-set about themselves, how one views oneself. Too often we can be our own worse enemies, beating ourselves up with negative thinking, then we wonder why our life isn't working out the way we wish it to be.

You might say, You Can Heal Your Life is a predecessor of the popular DVD and book The Secret, but instead of visualizing material things in one's life, one visualizes a better self. What amazes me about Ms. Hay's book, it's so uplifting considering her own life was anything but ideal. From an early age, she was sexually abused and molested, she therefore grew up having a very low self esteem and self-worth of herself. It wasn't until she joined up many years later with classes given out by a branch of Ernest Holmes' Science of Mind, whose many principles are positive thinking, that she herself began to realize that she had value in life and was worthy.

Ms Hay later became a Science of Mind "practitioner" herself, teaching her own classes. Her belief system not only raises one's worth, by repeating positive affirmations, but by getting a more positive frame of mind, one can even heal oneself of many medical problems. This was to hit home for her personally when sometime ago, she was stricken by cancer. Now she had to walk the walk, and talk the talk and began her own self-healing and is now cancer free and is in her eighties and is still as vibrantly alive as always. Toward the back of this book are positive affirmations for just about any medical condition, for she believes that often one manifests certain medical conditions due to stress, bitterness, resentment, hate and anger that we cling to and manifests itself one way or another medically.

One of the methods she introduces is saying positive affirmations while looking at oneself in the mirror. The most important one, is to look right into one's own eyes and say "I love you..(and one's name). At first it might seem silly to do this..but is beating ourselves up, talking negatively any better? Of course not. You Can Heal Your Life is a classic among classics in the self-help and inspirational genre and is a real must in any person's book collection. I highly recommend it.

The real good news however with the whole You Can Heal Your Life concept, is that now her concepts are also in a wonderful DVD as well, that not only has Ms. Hay in it, but also other people in the "positve thinking" business as well, such as Dr. Wayne W. Dyer,Gregg Braden, Cheryl Richardson (who has made numerous appearances on the Orpah show), Ester and Jery Hicks, Doreen Virtue, Ph.D, Candace B. Pret, and several others. The DVD opens up to a rather ordinary woman who is thinking one negative thought after another about herself, the classic case of beating oneself up. As she walks along a busy city street, she is surrounded by people who are also thinking negatvely to themselves. One woman however, passes her by, with a smile on her face in anticipation of seeing her boyfriend. Her walk is bouncy and light, so different from the other woman who is downcast. The "positive" woman accidently drops a card, which the negative woman picks up. On the card is says one simple sentence "I am willing to Change," and on the back of the card is a paragraphed positive affirmation. As she continues to walk along, she sees in an alleyway, a strange stone archway, that is identical to the picture on the card. She somehow makes the connection that she is to step through that archway and begin her journey to change.

The You Can Heal Yourself DVD follows the journey of this woman who is willing to change for the better, and in between these segments Louise Hay and the others further discuss the prinicples of positive thinking and of changing one's life. Just as the book is uplifting, so is the DVD. I actually found myself crying at points as some points really hit home for me and in my own life.

In either case, I can't recommend more highly both the book and the DVD, for the DVD further expands the concepts found in the book.

You Can Heal Your Life DVD official Website

(One can download and watch the dvd on-line for only $4.95)

Official Website

Louise Hay's Official Website: For books, DVDs, inspiration and more

Louise Hay's Website