You Can Heal Your Life

In the film business, when something’s a success, it gets done again, and again, and maybe again. To say that What the Bleep and The Secret were successful is kind of like saying that Barack Obama ran a pretty good campaign.

What the Bleep had a bleep of a run at the box office in 2004, and the success of The Secret a couple of years later on DVD turned it into an industry unto itself. Imitators popped up and a style was born, one in which authors, teachers, and healers discuss quantum physics, metaphysics, and the search for love, wealth, and meaning in the universe. In the meantime, nameless seekers wander through the narrative, eventually putting the principles into effect.

Two terms pop up pretty regularly when someone appears on the screen – “visionary” and “pioneer”. No one explains what you have to do to be a visionary (see things, presumably), but everyone knows what pioneers do. They put on coonskin caps and blaze trails, and pretty soon they’re leading wagon trains into new territory.

Few people deserve to be called a pioneer more than Louise Hay, and You Can Heal Yourself is a DVD chronicle of her life and her career as she enters her eighth decade, the one that she’s decided is going to be her best ever.

That’s the kind of statement that’s her trademark – simple, direct, confident. Things weren’t always that clear, though. She apparently had a pretty good life “until I was about eighteen months old”. Her parents divorced and she went through foster homes until she was five, and then wound up back with her mother, who had remarried. The next ten years were a chronicle of physical and sexual abuse, until she left home at fifteen and headed for Chicago, New York, and a high-fashion modeling career.

A marriage to an English aristocrat ended in divorce, and she found herself at the Church of Religious Science in New York, where she came across the idea that if you can change your thoughts, you can change your life. The rest, as they say, is – well, maybe not history. It’s her story – one she created an affirmation at a time.

Keeping it simple.

Louise Hay’s publishing career had its start in her bedroom in Santa Monica, and Hay House is now an empire. The seed was Hay’s small 1976 pamphlet, Heal Your Body, which included her now-famous list of dis-eases and their true spiritual and metaphysical roots, and which was expanded into the book You Can Heal Your Life in 1984. The list is so simple, basic, and obvious that you could see it being recited by a shaman around a campfire. Problems in the hips or feet? Inability or unwillingness to move forward. Problems in the hands? Inability to grasp or let go. Alzheimer’s? A desire to leave the planet.

Simplicity, though, may well be the cornerstone of the ability to heal. The information we get from doctors is usually beyond our comprehension, and, often as not, it’s meant to scare us. Sometimes, it can actually scare the life out of us, and it was one of the scariest diseases ever that propelled Louise Hay and Hay House into the national spotlight.

Welcome to the Hay Ride.

The disease was one in which the body began to destroy itself – AIDS. It spread like wildfire through gay men and intravenous drug users in California, populations that were naturals for Hays’ message that the way to heal yourself was to love yourself, and accept yourself just as you are. She started a program in her living room, “a safe place for people that were terrified out of their wits”. Six people showed up, then twenty, thirty, sixty, until local government gave her a space that drew 850 people, and the Hay Ride was born – not a wagon train, but close enough.

Just to show she was walking her talk, Hay created money and a director out of thin air to make a video about the Hay Ride; scenes from it are on the DVD. The next step? Donahue and Oprah the same week, and You Can Heal Yourself was soon involved with a different list – the one the New York Times keeps of best-selling non-fiction. It’s been there ever since, translated into over thirty-five languages.

Hay House celebrated its twentieth anniversary last year, and now represents some of the top names in the field – Wayne Dyer, Esther and Jerry Hicks, Marianne Williamson. Many of them appear on the DVD, and their admiration and gratitude are obvious. The real star, though, is Louise Hay and her message, whether from her or from the tributes from teachers and writers like Dyer, Hicks, Greg Braden, Mona Lisa Schulz, Doreen Virtue:

• You are creating the story of your own life, and you can change it with a few words, if you’re willing to take the first steps.
• If it feels fake at first, keep going. Affirmations are like doing reps of an exercise, and their strength builds.
• Once you’ve planted the seed, let it grow – don’t dig in the earth to check it.
• Affirmations are scientifically validated by electromagnetic field research. When you change the field, you can change atomic structure and alter reality.
• Most importantly, the answer to almost any problem is forgiveness, a gift to your self. Even Mark Twain, not known for his sunny outlook on life, knew that. “Forgiveness,” he said, “is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushes it.”

You Can Heal Your Life, directed by Michael Goorjiani (Illusion) and produced by Gay Hendricks and Steven Simon, founders of Spiritual Cinema Circle, a DVD subscription service offering hard-to-find films with inspiring and uplifting themes. It’s the December feature pick for SCC subscribers.

(800) 556-0129, or www.spiritualcinemacircle.com

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Michael Abedin is a freelance writer and the owner, publisher, and editor of Austin All Natural magazine, printed and distributed in Austin, Texas and available online at www.AustinAllNatural.com.